The end of 2017 saw some important and long-awaited changes in Ukraine, including the passage of legislation to reform the judiciary, the pension system, and the health care system—all steps greeted positively by the IMF and World Bank. Agreements with the United States to assist with Ukraine’s cybersecurity efforts and defensive needs were also welcome. At the same time, the country was shaken by new tensions with neighboring countries, especially Belarus, over charges of spying, and Poland, as a result of how memory policies in the two countries are structured. Turbulence on the domestic front also manifested in large rallies and protests of various origins. Disagreements within the anticorruption agencies resulted in lack of progress on an independent anticorruption court, which international bodies see as critical. As the 2019 elections draw near, 2018 is unlikely to be less turbulent domestically.

1. FOREIGN POLICY ISSUES

Relations with the United States

Cybersecurity. On September 29, the United States and Ukraine held the first Bilateral Cybersecurity Dialogue in Kyiv. The United States recognized cyberthreats as one of the most crucial challenges for Ukraine and confirmed its desire to support the strengthening of Ukraine’s national cybersecurity, especially that pertaining to critical infrastructure and the military. Later, the U.S. embassy said that the country would provide $5 billion in assistance to Ukraine to strengthen cybersecurity. On November 7, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko signed the law “On Key Principles of Ensuring Ukraine’s Cyber Security” (which had been approved by parliament on October 5).

Defensive Aid. The U.S. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 went into force on December 12. According to Section 1234 of the act, the United States has approved $350 million in aid to Ukraine to enhance the country’s security during the 2018 fiscal year. That figure includes funds for lethal defensive aid. According to the act, the support is to include air defense and coastal defense radars, naval mine and countermine capabilities, and littoral-zone and coastal defense vessels. The act also stipulates the treatment of wounded Ukrainian soldiers in the United States (including transportation, lodging, meals, and other appropriate nonmedical support in connection with such treatment) and education and training of Ukrainian health care specialists.

Turkey

Erdoğan’s Visit to Kyiv. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a presidential delegation visited Kyiv on October 9. The Ukrainian and Turkish presidents held a one-on-one meeting that lasted three hours instead of the planned forty-five minutes. Later, President Erdoğan stated that Turkey did not recognize the legitimacy of Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and would continue to support Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. That announcement was especially important in light of the huge Crimean Tatar diaspora population living in Turkey.

Release of Political Prisoners. President Erdoğan subsequently acted as a mediator in the release of two Ukrainian citizens, the Crimean Tatars Akhtem Chiygoz (deputy chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People) and Ilmi Umerov (a Crimean politician), both of whom had been imprisoned in Russia on political grounds: they opposed and did not publicly recognize the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula. Chiygoz had been charged with organizing an illegal demonstration and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment. Umerov had been charged with fomenting separatism and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. Both trials had been condemned by international rights organizations and Western countries.

As a result of the negotiations between President Erdoğan and Russia, on October 25 the prisoners were released and flown to Ankara, where they met with Turkey’s president. Two days later they landed in Kyiv. The former chairman of the Mejlis, Mustafa Dzhemilev, announced later that the prisoners had been exchanged for criminals, the murderers of the editor of the Kavkaz Center website.

Diplomatic Tensions with Belarus

On November 17, the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine disclosed that one of its journalists, Pavlo Sharoiko, had been arrested in Minsk. The Belarusian security services accused him of espionage (on behalf of Ukraine) and said he had confessed his involvement in intelligence activity. The KGB, the Belarussian state security agency, also stated that Sharoiko had established his own network of agents and was investigating the Russian military in Belarus. The Intelligence Department of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense stated that Sharoiko, who had been the department’s spokesman, had left the service in 2009 for health reasons.

On November 20, Belarus declared a Ukrainian diplomat in the Minsk embassy persona non grata for directing Sharoiko’s activity. In response, the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry (MFA) declared one of the diplomats in the Belarusian embassy in Kyiv persona non grata.

Diplomatic Tensions with Serbia

In late October the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia said in an interview with local media that Russia was using Serbia to destabilize the Western Balkans and destroy united Europe. As might be expected, this statement prompted criticism from official Belgrade, which responded with a statement that the Ukrainian embassy was seeking to degrade Russian-Serbian relations.

Polish-Ukrainian Tensions over Historical Memory Policies

Poland and Ukraine have enjoyed very warm relations over the past two decades, during which time Poland was probably Ukraine’s most loyal advocate in the West. However, historical memory is an extremely sensitive issue in Polish-Ukrainian relations. During all the years of independence, tensions have occasionally flared on this ground. In some cases, variant readings of history were promulgated by provocateurs. But until recently all those incidents were handled at the top levels, and such engagement sometimes resulted in even closer and warmer relations between both states and their citizens.

In the latest episode, tensions that had been simmering over the past two years reached a boiling point in the fourth quarter of 2017. Former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski (who had earlier participated in negotiations with Ukraine and whose role in improving relations between the two states is significant) during his speech in Kyiv at the 14th YES (Yalta European Strategy) Conference noted a growing risk of worsening relations. Among the reasons Kwaśniewski mentioned was rising nationalism in Poland (though that did not appear exceptional because of similar processes occurring across all of Europe).

In 2016, the Kyiv city administration renamed a couple of streets after some leaders of the Ukrainian liberation movement, which caused concern in Poland. Later, in July 2016, the Polish parliament voted to recognize the Wolyn massacre of 1943–1944 as a genocide carried out by a branch of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Some observers consider that renaming the streets had pushed Poland into its decision, even though streets in some other big cities in Ukraine had already been named after members of the liberation movement. The Ukrainian parliament expressed concern over acts of vandalism at Ukrainian monuments in Poland. From 2014 up to mid-2017 at least fifteen such cases of vandalism of Ukrainian monuments in Poland occurred (compared to four cases of vandalism of Polish memorials in Ukraine).

Tensions started heating up beginning on April 26, when in the Polish village of Hrushowice a group of activists, all members of nationalist organizations, demolished the memorial to soldiers of the UPA (erected in 1994). The vandalism occurred two days before the seventieth anniversary of the Wolyn tragedy and in the presence of local officials and police, who did not try to stop it. Local officials said that the memorial had been erected illegally. However, it had stood for more than twenty-three years, and in Ukraine some monuments to Polish memory were supposedly illegally erected too. So a sort of public consensus on leaving those monuments alone had been observed before the period of high tension and the acts of vandalism.

In response to the destruction of the monument, the government-run Ukrainian Institute of National Memory announced its decision to suspend Polish applications for building a new memorial in Ukraine or registering and restoring existing memorials. The Ukrainian MFA called the act a provocation. In any event, it contributed to aggravating the situation, with official recriminations flying on both sides and various diplomatic maneuvers launched to cool tensions while defending the home nation’s stance.

On November 2, Poland announced a ban on entry into the country of anyone who subscribed to an anti-Polish ideology and those who stood in the way of Poland renewing its memorial sites—an indication of the pain caused by each country’s historical memory policies. Also denied entry was the executive secretary of the State Interdepartmental Commission to Perpetuate the Memory of Participants in Antiterrorist Operations, Victims of War and Political Repression, part of Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministries (this news leaked out on November 18 when the official tried to enter Poland). The Ukrainian MFA responded with a statement asserting that Ukraine did not hold an anti-Polish attitude. Perhaps the sharpest rebuttal came a few days later from the head of the Polish MFA, who said that Kyiv was misusing Warsaw. Polish president Andrzej Duda appealed to the Ukrainian president to remove people who harbored anti-Polish attitudes from the state decision-making system.

Historical memory is an especially sensitive and delicate matter, and all steps taken in that arena must be carefully deliberated. Even seemingly insignificant issues can, singly or cumulatively, spark serious problems. A step toward resolving the conflict was taken by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who on November 8 initiated a meeting of the Consultative Committee of the Presidents of Ukraine and Poland, which was accepted by the Polish side.

Against the background of tensions and President Poroshenko’s obvious desire to move forward in solving them, President Duda visited Kharkiv on December 13. After the meeting with his Polish colleague, President Poroshenko stated that both agreed to shorten the list of Ukrainians banned from entering Poland and that the two countries would jointly look for historical truth on matters involving their countries in the past. It looked as though the two presidents had managed to find a consensus, and by the end of the year much of the tension between the two countries seemed to have dissipated. However, in the first quarter of 2018 new misunderstandings on the ground of historical memory sprang up. More general issues concerning the tensions caused by the two states’ historical memory policies are discussed in another article on Focus Ukraine.

It is important to understand that not all Poles share a belief that conflicts have escalated between the two countries. Donald Tusk, for example—president of the European Commission, former Polish prime minister, and former vice chair of the Polish Senate—said that Poland could not be safe so long as it was in conflict with Ukraine. In speaking about the Polish dispute with Ukraine and Poland’s internal and foreign policy in general, he a question about the reasons and drivers: was it a strategy of the Polish ruling party Law and Justice or was it the Kremlin’s plan?

The Law on Education: Tension Reaches a Peak

In the fourth quarter of 2017 the saga surrounding the new Law on Education, which has sparked tensions with neighboring countries by disallowing the former practice of permitting instruction in minority languages at higher levels of schooling, continued unabated. On October 6, Thorbjørn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, commenting on the situation with the law, said that ethnic minorities had to have full rights to and the possibility of studying in their native language (and Ukraine should facilitate same), but should also be fluent in the official language. In general, he underscored that determining minority language rights was a delicate matter.

On October 11–12, the law was discussed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). President Poroshenko visited the session, outlined the reasons for the law, and answered questions. In its decision on October 12, PACE expressed concern with articles related to education in minority languages and asked Ukraine to implement further the recommendations and conclusions of the Venice Commission, a body that provides assistance in interpreting constitutional law.

Hungary was dissatisfied with the language principles of the law and started pressuring Kyiv. On September 26 the Hungarian government stated it would block the EU’s decision to establish closer relations with Ukraine. On October 10, while visiting Uzhhorod (a city in the West of Ukraine), the head of the Hungarian MFA said that the new law violated the principles of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and that he would initiate revising the agreement at the meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxemburg. However, he stressed that Ukraine remained a strategic partner for Hungary. In response, the Ukrainian foreign affairs minister said that Ukraine did not have any intention of forcing the assimilation of ethnic minorities and would not leave them bereft of their native languages. At the same time he stressed Kyiv’s intention to support knowledge of the official language by all citizens.

On October 13 a rally was held near the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest under the name “Self-Determination for Zakarpattia” (Zakarpattia is the region of Ukraine bordering Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, and Poland where ethnic Hungarians live). The rally’s organizers said they were demanding self-determination for the region and freedom for all ethnic minorities in the region.

Though Hungary protested the Ukrainian law more strongly than did other of Ukraine’s neighbors, Hungary has problems with its own law on education. The European Commission even decided to bring an action before the European Court of Justice against Hungary on the grounds that amendments to the law were restricting the rights of some universities.

In the end, on October 19, Ukraine and Hungary agreed to collaborate in implementing Ukraine’s law. At the same time, Poland announced it would oppose revising the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement—an idea that had been floated because of Ukraine’s new Law on Education—and would encourage Ukraine and Hungary to cooperate in finding a solution. Finally, on October 23, the Polish vice-prime minister said he had been able to find consensus with Ukraine on the language issues of the education law. The next day Polish and Ukrainian officials signed a declaration guaranteeing the right of minorities to study in their native language. The Bulgarian minority in Ukraine had supported the new law during a round-table discussion in the Bulgarian embassy on October 12.

On December 11 the Venice Commission announced its final decision on Ukraine’s Law on Education. The decision did not share the opinion of the law’s chief critics, including Hungary. The commission agreed that the law provided only a framework and that other, subsequent legislation remained to be developed, so that the principles of the law as it currently stood did not violate the rights of minorities. It encouraged Ukraine to be more specific when developing this legislation so as to decrease the space for interpretation. Among other things, the commission recommended the following steps:

Ukraine should continue ensuring a sufficient proportion of education in minority languages at the primary and secondary levels, in addition to teaching the state language.

The quality of teaching of the state language should be improved.

The relevant transitional provisions of the Law on Education should be amended to provide more time for a gradual implementation of reforms.

Within the framework of the implementation of the new Law on Education, Ukraine should enter into a new dialogue with representatives of national minorities and all interested parties concerning the language of education.

The decision by the Venice Commission that the new education law provided only a framework, to be elaborated later, and its subsequent recommendations are likely to bring an end to the acrimonious discussions and ease tensions both inside Ukraine and with Ukraine’s neighbors.

UN Resolution on Crimea

On December 19, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Crimea, with seventy countries voting for it, twenty-six against, and seventy-six abstaining. The resolution, which was introduced by Ukraine and thirty other states, recognized the existence of an international armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, condemned human rights violations in annexed Crimea, and urged Russia to restore human rights in Crimea in accordance with the order of the International Court of Justice.

Eastern Partnership Summit

On November 24, the fifth summit of the Eastern Partnership took place in Brussels. The summit defined twenty new tasks and aims for the six Eastern partners in the economic, governance, and civil society realms, to be achieved by 2020. Regarding Ukraine’s, Georgia’s and Moldova’s EU membership prospects, the summit acknowledged the European aspirations and European choice of those partners. The summit’s final joint declaration also mentioned the prospects of the partners gaining access to EU’s energy and digital markets. The declaration did not mention Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine or a UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas; however, those issues were brought up indirectly by the EU representatives during the summit.

2. INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Conflicts between the Anticorruption Agencies

The last quarter of 2018 was marked by strong tensions between old and new law enforcement agencies and strong reactions from the West and international organizations. The latest episode started with the conflict between National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP), which was followed by serious tensions between NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (PGOU). This was followed by an attempt to turn NABU in a direction less dependent on certain officials, which effort has failed.

All these events provoked sharp criticism from Western countries and international organizations, which had supported starting anticorruption reform and the establishment of new agencies in Ukraine to battle corruption. Without going deeper into the reasons for those conflicts, it suffices to say that deliberately heavy-handed actions could cause serious losses for Ukraine.

Scandal in the NACP. The agency formed in March 2015 to fight corruption continues to be beset with scandal. On November 14, an employee of the NACP publicly accused the organization’s chief, Nataliia Korchak, of involvement in falsifying verifications of electronic declarations. The employee said that the process was supervised by someone in the presidential administration. The person she named was a prominent contender for a post with the recently established State Bureau of Investigation. After that revelation, it became clear that the NACP was not an elected body but a public commission heavily connected to the presidential administration.

NABU started investigating the case, but this effort was stymied when on November 8 the NACP requested that NABU’s chief, Artem Sytnyk, provide some documents, a request he refused. A few days earlier the NAPC had reprimanded one of NABU’s officers for unethical behavior and conflicts of interest with an MP. The head of the Office of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (SAPO), Nazar Kholodnytskyi, described the situation as a case of getting even between the two agencies. Later, Chief Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, on the petition of SAPO’s Nazar Kholodnytskii, removed NABU from the investigation into possible corruption in the NACP. The Security Service of Ukraine opened an investigation in this case.

Escalating Conflict between NABU and PGOU. On November 16, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said it was starting an investigation into the NABU’s chief’s alleged divulging of information regarding a case the NABU was investigating. On November 22, Lutsenko said that NABU had refused to accept investigations from the Prosecutor General’s Office. In response, NABU’s chief said that they did not refuse such assignments but were shorthanded. But the hottest stage in the escalating conflict between NABU and PGOU started in late November when Chief Prosecutor Lutsenko stated that NABU agents were often acting without the necessary legal permissions.

On November 29, a NABU special agent was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) for trying to bribe a clerk of the State Migration Service of Ukraine. The SBU also charged that NABU personnel had tried offering bribes earlier too. Later the SBU conducted a search of NABU’s facilities. The following day, November 30, NABU issued a statement accusing the Prosecutor General’s Office and SBU of hampering its operation on disclosing corruption in the State Migration Service of Ukraine. NABU does not have the right to conduct certain kinds of surveillance activities, such as phone-tapping, and uses the SBU’s services. So NABU charged the SBU with recruiting the person suspected by NABU of trying to discredit NABU later.

On December 5, Lutsenko said there was no battle between the Prosecutor General’s Office and NABU. It is clear that in some cases the chiefs of all the agencies mentioned were speaking emotionally, but the real scope of and reasons for the tensions between NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office in that period are not clear.

At the same time, official representatives of the United States and the EU stated they would continue supporting NABU and SAPO. On December 5, the EU warned that public disclosure of a corruption investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office weakened the capacity of Ukraine and hindered NABU’s efforts to battle corruption. The U.S. Department of State condemned the conflict between NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office, which was regarded as an attempt to undermine the anticorruption institutions supported by the United States. In turn, Chief Prosecutor Lutsenko said that NABU’s chief, Artem Sytnyk, could not cope with his tasks. So Sytnyk recruited the West as an advocate and started a campaign against Lutsenko in the United States.

Attempt to Disarm NABU. In the middle of December, the head of Poroshenko’s and Arseniy Yatseniuk’s parties’ parliamentary faction submitted to parliament the draft of a law that would have allowed the firing of NABU’s chief without an investigation. Successful passage of the law could easily have made the new anticorruption agencies dependent on top officials and would have undermined the efficacy of the anticorruption reforms. Thus the proposed law ignited a barrage of criticism from international organizations and Western countries.

On November 7 Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), stressed that anticorruption reform was among the preconditions of collaboration with Ukraine. She appealed to lawmakers not to support the draft, to stop the attacks on NABU, and to support establishing an anticorruption court in Ukraine. Opinion leaders and officials in the EU and United States issued strong statements on the matter (see, for example, here, here, and here). Adopting the law could have threatened further financial assistance for Ukraine and possibly even cancellation of the visa-free regime. Ultimately parliament decided not to hold a vote on the draft bill.

Saakashvili in Kyiv

Rising Protests. After Mikheil Saakashvili returned to Ukraine, violating border-crossing procedures, Kyiv was rocked by protests led by Saakashvili, some MPs, and civil activists. On October 17 several thousand political and civil society activists and Saakashvili supporters convened on the square in front of the Verkhovna Rada in a planned rally labeled the “All-Ukrainian Gathering” to demand that parliament undertake what the rally’s organizers called “great political reform.” The main demands of the protesters were (1) establishing an anticorruption court, (2) abolishing immunity of the deputies, and (3) adopting new legislation regarding elections. A tent camp was established for the duration of the protest, about a week. There were occasional clashes between the protesters and police and National Guard soldiers. Saakashvili promised he could change the country in seventy days, which is patently impossible because of the need to follow legal procedures. These require a much longer time to effect change. December 3 saw another large rally calling for the impeachment of Poroshenko.

Arrest. On December 5, the SBU conducted an operation jointly with the Prosecutor General’s Office to arrest Saakashvili at his apartment in downtown Kyiv. Attempting to avoid arrest, Saakashvili climbed out onto the roof of the building and threatened to jump off. However, the drama did not help, and Saakashvili was captured by officers. He was charged with cooperating with the Ukrainian oligarch Vitalii Kurchenko (close to the absconded Viktor Yanukovych), who had likewise fled to Russia, and with receiving funds from Kurchenko and others to start a coup in Ukraine. Chief Prosecutor Lutsenko went to parliament to address the members and inform them of the charges and some of the evidence. He played sound recordings of people (some of the voices sounded like Saakashvili’s) discussing collaborating on those issues.

During the arrest, a wildcat rally of Saakashvili supporters took place outside the building. Saakashvili was not arrested for some time: his supporters, who had gathered near his apartment, forcefully freed him from the SBU van and the crowd moved toward the parliament building to start a protest rally. The law enforcement officers refrained from opening fire (though they would have been within their rights to do so) to prevent escalating the situation. Saakashvili denounced the charges as trumped up, then turned to demanding the resignation of Lutsenko and the head of the SBU, laying blame for the events at Poroshenko’s feet and demanding he be impeached.

After Saakashvili managed to escape from custody, protests at the parliament building became more organized, with more people participating and a tent camp established. Saakashvili even promised to remain in the camp with the protestors. The next morning the police tried to take the camp by storm but failed; some protesters were injured in the attempt. Saakashvili himself was not in the camp, however, but ensconced in a hotel five minutes’ walk from the camp.

Three days after the first attempt to arrest Saakashvili the police seized him in a friend’s apartment and detained him in jail. Another spontaneous protest occurred outside the facility. On December 11, the court decided not to place Saakashvili under arrest for the period of the investigation, which meant he was subject neither to house arrest nor to detention. The drama will assuredly have more acts.

New Supervisory Board for Naftogaz

On November 22, 2017, the Ukrainian government approved new members of Naftogaz’s supervisory board, following the earlier resignation of many members of the previous board. The new members are four foreigners and two from Ukraine. The new board’s composition is even more illustrious than the old board’s. Among the members are Amos Hochstein from the United States (former U.S. Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs) and Clare Spottiswoode from the UK (former head of Ofgem, the British energy regulator), who subsequently became board chair.

3. PROGRESS IN REFORMS AND SUCCESS STORIES

On November 15, 2017, the European Commission published a report on the EU-Ukraine Association Implementation with an assessment of Ukraine’s progress toward reforms. The Commission believed that though Ukraine had demonstrated considerable progress in reforms, the pace of implementation had to be accelerated. The report stressed the need to continue battling corruption, including through the establishment of an independent anticorruption court.

Starting a State Bureau of Investigation

On November 22, President Poroshenko appointed Roman Truba director of the recently established State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). Truba and two deputies had been chosen by a special public commission after a long selection process lasting more than a year. Establishing the SBI is part of reforming the entire system of law enforcement authorities. Before the SBI was established, the Prosecutor General’s Office in Ukraine was responsible not only for judicial supervision but also for investigating crimes committed by persons serving in the legal system. The idea behind establishing the SBI is to turn the Prosecutor General’s Office into an agency responsible only for judicial supervision. The SBI will also be responsible for investigating crimes committed by high-level officials (corruption will be investigated by NABU). The main reason for such a division of authorities was the need for an independent agency to investigate crimes committed by persons capable of putting pressure on the investigator. In light of the professional ties existing between the Prosecutor General’s Office and other enforcement authorities, that risk was real.

Prosecutor General Lutsenko announced that the SBI will start its work toward the end of 2018.

Pension Reforms

On October 8, President Poroshenko signed legislation (passed by parliament on October 3) introducing changes to the pension system in Ukraine, including a provision for mandatory accumulation of pension assets. Pension reform was among the IMF’s requirements to continue its collaboration with Ukraine. Under the previous model, working citizens paid taxes into the State Pension Fund, which was responsible for paying pensioners. However, the fund was running a deficit, in part because 10 million employed individuals were supporting 12 million retirees. The reform roadmap gradually increases the qualifying period (thus effectively raising the existing retirement age) and stipulates the transition to a stock-based pension system. The new system was widely discussed between Kyiv, on one side, and the IMF and World Bank on the other. When all was said and done, the World Bank praised the reform, saying it would ensure stability of the pension system and help the most vulnerable among Ukraine’s population.

Health Care System Reforms

On December 28, President Poroshenko signed crucial and long-awaited legislation (passed by parliament on October 19) to reform the health care system. Prior to that, all medical services were supposed to have been available free of charge to citizens—a remnant of the old Soviet health care system. However, the reality was another matter. Polyclinics and hospitals did not have enough funds to provide free treatment, so patients had to spend their own money. The reform stipulates a division into free and paid medical services, with funding granted by the state medicine service to hospitals and clinics according to the number and quality of services provided by those institutions.

As part of the ongoing health care reforms, President Poroshenko also signed legislation to improve the availability and quality of medical care in rural areas. This piece of legislation is intended to solve the problem of lack of doctors in rural areas, mostly by connecting rural facilities to special medical centers through modern communication systems and improving the equipment available at rural clinics.

Judiciary Reforms

On November 22 the president signed legislation (passed by parliament on October 3) amending economic, civil, criminal, and administrative codes and other legislative acts. In aggregate, those changes, comprising some 4,383 amendments to existing legislation, fall under the rubric of judiciary reform. They continue earlier efforts at reform, which got under way in 2015.

On December 15, the new Supreme Court and the Supreme Specialized Court started working. The latter is now the principal court of review. The Supreme Specialized Court unites in its functions those of the previous supreme administrative and commercial courts, while the Supreme Court is dedicated to civil and criminal cases.

“Lozovyi’s Amendment”

On October 3, when voting for the judiciary reforms, parliament also adopted amendments to the criminal code that had been proposed by MP Andriy Lozovyi. In addition to some positive changes, “Lozovyi’s Amendment” also included some questionable ones. For instance, specific regional courts can now appoint experts (earlier only a case investigator or an ordinary court could call for an expert). Legal experts and practicing lawyers claim that this provision has the potential to lead to a collapse of the investigating system. Such criminal forensic examinations can also be conducted by state agencies. The main idea was to improve the quality of the evaluations, but if only government agencies are able to conduct expert analyses, private agencies used to doing the work are likely to go out of business. The amendment also limits the term for conducting pretrial investigations to six months—another provision roundly condemned by legal practitioners and law enforcement, especially in light of the current caseload burden and deficit of judges, both of which have resulted in lengthy pretrial periods.

Major Step toward Energy Independence

On December 7, parliament agreed to decrease significantly the rent rates for oil and gas extraction and prohibited increasing those rates until 2023. This step is expected to drive domestic production and contribute to Ukraine’s energy self-sufficiency. Although Ukraine’s gas reserves are estimated to be the third largest among European countries’ reserves, more than a third of the gas consumed in Ukraine today is imported. An increase in domestic gas and oil production should decrease spending on imported fuels and create new jobs, which should have a positive effect on Ukraine’s economy.

Preferences for e-Vehicles

On December 7, parliament canceled the VAT and excise duties for e-vehicles. These vehicles will now be 17 percent cheaper, which means they will be more competitive with traditional vehicles.

Extended Moratorium on Agricultural Land Sales

On December 7, the Verkhovna Rada narrowly approved extending the moratorium on agricultural land sales for one year more. This means that in 2018, there will be no legal land market in Ukraine. The moratorium was first established in 2002. The IMF requested the launch of a land market as one of the conditions for further collaboration with Ukraine. Currently large tracts of agricultural land are divided into smaller subplots and leased, which results in low economic productivity and disinterest on the part of foreign investors.

Anticorruption Court

Difficult discussions over the anticorruption court took place in Ukraine during the third quarter of 2017. Some officials, including President Poroshenko, were opposed to the idea of establishing such a court. Poroshenko said that he did not see much sense in establishing a separate anticorruption court and would prefer special anticorruption chambers within the existing courts, noting that a specific anticorruption court could be created later if it appeared needed. At the same time, social activists pointed out the risk of those chambers not being independent within the existing court system. Later, the Venice Commission rejected the idea of anticorruption chambers and strongly recommended establishing an independent anticorruption court. On the sidelines, the EU and the United States were waiting for Ukraine to adopt a law that would meet all requirements and expectations of the Venice Commission. However, by the end of the year not much progress had been made.

The idea of an anticorruption court in Ukraine should not be sacralized: it will be efficacious only if other anticorruption authorities manage to adduce enough evidence of corruption in any given case. But that remains problematic in Ukraine. The absence of sufficient evidence and inability to prove corruption in the end can only result in a verdict of not guilty. This means that the whole judicial system’s approach to battling corruption still needs to be improved. The absence of an anticorruption court is not the only stumbling block in solving the problem in Ukraine.

4. THE SITUATION IN THE DONBAS

Legislation and Regulation on Donbas

On October 6, the Ukrainian parliament voted for a one-year extension of a law already in effect (passed by parliament in 2014) that introduced the special status of, and specific conditions for local governance within, the noncontrolled parts of Donbas and Luhansk regions. The U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker considered that to be taking tough steps for peace and ending the conflict in the Donbas. This initiative was supported by the German government as well.

With the original 2014 act, Ukraine (1) guaranteed that participants in the conflict in the Donbas would not be criminally prosecuted, (2) established specific procedures for appointing judges and prosecutors in the noncontrolled regions (the local government must participate in the process), and (3) established people’s militias to maintain control and provide law and order. However, the one-year extension stipulated that the full implementation of the 2014 law would start after the complete exit of illegal military forces and troops from the region.

UN-OSCE Peacekeeping Mission in the Donbas

In August, President Poroshenko announced the idea of starting a peacekeeping mission in the Donbas with the participation of UN and OSCE personnel. Later, on September 5, Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed that a peacekeeping mission would contribute to good results. However, he stated that this had to be discussed with the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk and that the main task of the mission should be to protect OSCE personnel serving on the border between the controlled and noncontrolled parts of Ukraine. That same day, Ukrainian foreign affairs minister Pavlo Klimkin said that Ukraine did not want Russians to participate in the peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. Russian foreign affairs minister Sergei Lavrov said on December 7 that Russia’s interests were not being observed by the peacekeeping mission in the Donbas and that an expanded mandate would be equivalent to establishing an occupational administration. Klimkin retorted that an occupational administration had already been established in the region. Special Representative Volker said he did not imagine any way for Russia to participate in the mission. There were expectations that the issue could be resolved by the end of 2017. However, little progress was achieved.

Fake Republic: Power Shift

At the end of 2018 conflict arose among the leaders of the Luhansk separatists. The separatist leader Ihor Plotnyckyi and the head of the so-called “people’s police,” Ihor Kornet, were at loggerheads. Plotnyckyi relieved Kornet of his duties because of suspected criminal activities. Kornet demanded the arrest of other “officials” close to Plotnyckyi whom he suspected of spying for Kyiv. Kornet and the militants surrounded and occupied some buildings while waiting for the arrival of support in the form of militants from Donetsk.

Plotnyckyi initially tried to persuade citizens that the situation was under control and would be resolved soon. But the coup was successful, and on November 24, Plotnyckyi announced he was resigning for health reasons and left Luhansk for Russia. Kornet became the new leader of the Luhansk separatists. But because Plotnyckyi was among those who had signed the Minsk agreements, the new self-proclaimed leadership announced he was still responsible for the Minsk process.

Exchange of Hostages

December 23 saw the largest prisoner exchange since conflict broke out in the east of the country. The separatist forces released seventy-four people who had been captured in the noncontrolled Donbas. In exchange, Ukraine released 306 prisoners, not all of whom chose to return to the pro-Russia breakaway regions.

China has big plans to invest in Ukraine. Today the wealthiest Ukrainians tend to spend their hryvnia savings, fearing high inflation and devaluation of the hryvnia. As the situation is very unstable, nobody except the National Bank of Ukraine is trying to predict the hryvnia exchange rate. The treasury is emptying and the state’s debts are growing, though the risk of panic is still low.

Because of these and other problems with its economy, Ukraine needs capital investments and access to sales markets. Chinese investments can help Ukraine accelerate its economic growth. To some extent, that is already happening: in 2017, for example, the trade volume between China and Ukraine increased 18 percent over the previous year’s volume, to U.S. $7.68 billion. But this raises additional questions around the growing Chinese presence in Ukraine.

As recently signed agreements show, China and Ukraine have either started or are about to start cooperating in the areas of trade, economy, agriculture, space, science and technology, education, culture, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. The list of joint projects for 2018 includes the following:

building a $2 billion new metro line in Kyiv,

building a $400 million passenger railway connecting Kyiv with Boryspil International Airport,

creating a solar energy farm near the closed Chornobyl nuclear energy plant, and

building two giant Antonov An-225 aircraft in Chengdu and Shaanxi.

Over the past decade, China and Ukraine have regularly and in good faith demonstrated their readiness to expand cooperation with each other in various fields. Some important bilateral events have recently taken place that underscore an interest in cooperation. In January 2015, China’s prime minister Li Keqiang had a friendly meeting with President Poroshenko during the Davos forum. And President Xi Jinping held productive talks with President Poroshenko in Washington during a security summit in April 2016. In December 2017, the Chinese vice premier Ma Kai visited Kyiv and signed an action plan with Ukraine on jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road—together known as the Belt and Road initiative—and agreed to deepen all-around collaboration to strengthen the two countries’ strategic partnership, during the third session of the China-Ukraine Intergovernmental Commission on bilateral cooperation.

The potential length of the Silk Road from China to Ukraine is 5,471 kilometers. This route is interesting for Ukraine from the geopolitical and economic perspectives. One of its lines may go from China through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Black Sea, ultimately reaching the Ukrainian port of Chernomorsk (former Ilyichevsk). From there it could extend farther into Europe. If approved, this route could be hugely important to Ukraine’s economy.

It is also clear from my meetings with the Ukrainian business community that many entrepreneurs are willing to start joint projects with Chinese partners in the near future.

Nonetheless, despite friendly meetings and big plans, relations between China and Ukraine are producing few tangible results. Unlike Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, or Azerbaijan, Ukraine is still not an active member of the “Silk Road of the 21st Century” initiative. For instance, China’s cumulative total investment in the economy of Kazakhstan, which is an active member of the initiative, now exceeds $42.8 billion, while the volume of credit was more than $50 billion at the end of 2017. Those figures are much greater than China’s investments in Ukraine so far.

If Ukraine’s participation in the Silk Road still exists only on paper, other countries have already undertaken substantial practical steps. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey have already opened the new Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line. In the future, this line will be a link in the New Silk Road connecting China to Europe and on to London through a tunnel under the Bosporus in Turkey. This route avoids—and competes with—the Ukrainian (and has the potential to choke off Russia as a transport route between China and the West).

Ukraine is also excluded from the “16+1” cooperation format so far. According to this format, sixteen Central and Eastern European countries will receive over 2.5 billion euros in Chinese investment. Eleven EU member states and the five Balkan countries will also cooperate directly with Beijing. The cooperation format excludes Brussels as well as Kyiv.

Thus, almost all of Ukraine’s neighbors are actively involved in ambitious cooperative initiatives with China. Clearly, Ukraine’s involvement is not on par with that of its neighbors.

Kyiv, however, is in no hurry to cooperate with China. There are certain understandable grounds for the foot dragging. Many Ukrainian politicians prefer not to prioritize cooperation with China. Some are focused on Europe and Euro-integration as the best path for Ukraine’s development. Others shun working with Communist China, despite China’s apparent increasing emphasis on the market dimension of its hybrid socialist market economy. Also, as I have come to understand, neither the ruling political groups in Ukraine nor the opposition have a firm grasp of China’s political and economic system, and this deficit in understanding likely explains the lack of a broader Ukraine-China dialogue. Before any expansion of cooperation between Beijing and Kyiv becomes possible, the Ukrainian elites will have to better inform themselves about China.

In addition to these primarily emotional obstacles to Ukraine-China cooperation, Kyiv has well-founded economic and geostrategic concerns. Geopolitically, China is a strategic ally of Russia, a country that launched the hybrid war to obstruct Ukraine’s turn to the West in 2014. At the same time the United States, one of Ukraine’s allies, is engaged in economic rivalry with China. Thus both economic and security concerns add to Kiev’s reticence in furthering relations with Beijing.

China has its own concerns as well. Unlike Kyiv, official Beijing is well informed about what is happening in Ukraine. From the Chinese perspective, as I learned from recent communications with decision makers in Beijing, there are several obstacles to furthering cooperation with Ukraine. First and foremost, the Donbas conflict and the annexation of Crimea are seen as destabilizing factors with potential negative consequences for China. If the Silk Road is to go through the Black Sea, it should be a safe and stable trade route. Until the Russia-Ukraine conflict is resolved, this project is too risky for the Chinese to see through.

Second, China is keen that cooperation with either party to the conflict, Ukraine or Russia, should not hinder China’s neutrality vis-à-vis the conflict.

Third, the Chinese government is worried about repeated political regime changes in Kyiv and about the misuse of courts and high levels of corruption. It is clear that the Chinese authorities expect Kyiv to resolve these issues and offer stability for investors of the scale China offers.

Thus the potential for Ukraine-China cooperation exists within a framework of economic opportunities and geopolitical risks. Despite the obstacles, Ukraine likely will continue its recent trend of cooperating on well-defined projects in the economic, political, humanitarian, and cultural spheres. The drivers of such cooperation are the Ukrainian business community’s interests and Kyiv’s need to accelerate the nation’s growth. Ukraine and China can indeed be good partners, able to establish long-term, mutually beneficial relations, so long as the geopolitical rivalry of the great powers doesn’t get in the way of cooperation.

Ukraine is diverse in many ways. One of them is religion. Solidarity and fragmentation take place in this field as much as in politics. In a recent Kennan Cable Matt Rojansky and Mikhail Minakov showed how Ukraine’s democracy is connected to the competition among and cooperation of churches. However, we can also look at Ukrainian religious life from a nonpolitical, economic point of view. Let me show you how this can be done.

In 2000, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke published their seminal book, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, which has been praised by international scholars of religion and yet surprisingly overlooked and undervalued by scholars and pundits in Eastern Europe, including many in Ukraine. Today, eighteen years after its publication, the insights of this book seem to be much needed in Ukraine.

Acts of Faith sought to sum up multiple theoretical and empirical discussions of what sociologists call the supply-side approach. The supply-side theory identifies religious organizations as suppliers of religious products and services. As the story goes, the composition of religious markets is an important causal factor in the religious behavior of people. In other words, the religious behavior of individuals can be modeled successfully once one knows whether a religious market is competitive or concentrated, regulated or unregulated, omnipresent or isolated. These variables are crucial because they tell us a lot about the incentives and capacities of various religious organizations to be engaged with people as well as to influence them through the quality of the services they offer. All this in turn affects people as they make their religious choices.

One of the most original hypotheses derived from this theory is that religious pluralism (which sometimes manifests as church competition) should increase the religiosity of people. This expectation is formulated in strong contrast to the preceding conventional wisdom, which held that competition erodes legitimacy and the power of churches, thus making them susceptible to secular trends.

In contradistinction to that view, the supply-side theorists offered a novel, thought-provoking idea, namely, that church competition stimulates religious organizations to become more adaptive and to increase the quality of their services. This theory is more likely to work successfully in a democratic environment of pluralism, where people are free to express their individuality and church affiliation can be exercised as an unforced choice.

The supply-side approach has inspired many researchers to collect and analyze data on religious pluralism, church competition, and religious regulations around the world. The Religion and State (RAS) project is one of the most comprehensive attempts to make such data available. This project includes data on post-Communist societies. Figures 1 and 2 show two indexes for post-Communist societies from the early 1990s to 2007 derived from these data. The first index is called “Regulation of and Restrictions on the Majority Religion or All Religions” and is based on twenty-nine items describing various restrictions that may exist in a society, such as restrictions on religious political parties, public religious speech, access to places of worship, and so forth. The second index is called “Specific Types of Religious Legislation” and is based on fifty-one items, such as restrictions on the production, import, selling, or consumption of specific foods or alcohol, restrictions on interfaith marriages, tithing requirements, various restrictions on women’s public appearance, and the like.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of religious regulations and restrictions across post-Communist countries listed in the database. The darker shades indicate higher values of the index while gray indicates an absence of data. As can be seen, most of the religious regulations in the post-Communist space have been instituted in Asian countries, while Ukraine has witnessed lower rates of regulation, with levels comparable to those seen in Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Russia. Figure 2 shows the distribution of religious legislation. In terms of this index, Ukraine had one of the most relaxed legislative systems among all post-Communist societies.

Figure 1. Index of Regulation of and Restrictions on the Majority Religion or All Religions, RAS (1992–2008)

However, recently the Ukrainian religious market has received some signals that more intense regulation may be on the horizon. President Poroshenko has emphasized the importance of having one united Ukrainian Orthodox Church, while Ukrainian legislators argue about imposing new restrictions on churches with a center in the “aggressor state.” These actions are inspired to a large degree by the idea that a single united Orthodox Church will serve as a better religious pillar of society than a fragmented market of fiercely competing Orthodox jurisdictions. Interestingly, this very idea contradicts the logic of the supply-side narrative and can be challenged in light of the information provided in Acts of Faith. In fact, a greater concentration of the Orthodox confession could result in religious fatigue among Ukrainians and consequently increase secular trends.

What do these data tell us? The first clear observation is that the Orthodox competition increased in almost all regions of Ukraine after 2000. There are no more regions with Orthodox monopoly. Thus, the issue raised by Poroshenko and other politicians is of crucial importance for all regions of Ukraine. The second observation is that the western and central regions of Ukraine tend to have higher rates of Orthodox competition, while it is also known from other sources that these places tend to have higher religiosity in general. Thus, any decision about any state interventions will inevitably affect most devotional congregations in Ukraine.

While most of the public tends to agree that unification will make the Orthodox Church stronger and omnipresent, the outcome could in fact be quite different. Of course, the final outcome will depend on other factors that influence religious socialization, including educational and political institutions, as well as the process of political desecularization. Nevertheless, it seems that the exact mechanisms of how church competition operates are being disregarded by political actors and their advisers, and thus the political gesture of Poroshenko is at risk of posing a disservice to religious organizations in the long run. At least, that is what the supply-side theory suggests.

Almost four years after the change in government as a result of the Euromaidan, the annexation of Crimea, and the onset of war with Russian-backed separatists, Ukraine enters 2018 facing five strategic challenges.

First, Ukrainian sovereignty and national unity are being tested by factions both outside and inside the country. Second, Russia’s Ukrainian policy continues to pose the biggest threat to the existence of Ukraine. Third, Ukraine must find a way to strengthen its defense capabilities through an alliance with the United States and NATO as the strongest regional security guarantors with respect to Kyiv’s key priorities—independence, sovereignty, and unity.

Two more challenges have recently made their appearance. Ukraine has entered into a period of conflict with Hungary and Poland and worsening relations with some other Central European countries. Finally, relations between Brussels and Kyiv are at their coolest of the entire post-Maidan period.

The way Kyiv responds to all of these challenges will define Ukraine’s internal development in the next year and, most likely, for a long time to come.

Ukrainian Sovereignty and the Russian Threat

Ukrainian sovereignty and national unity are now seriously challenged by the state’s loss of control over part of its territory and population.

Of the six Eastern Partnership countries, Ukraine and Belarus have enjoyed a period of peaceful if very different development for more than twenty years. By contrast, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova were weighed down by ethnic and social conflicts, and have had territorial issues from the outset, since independence in 1991. Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria grew as autonomous regions—de facto states—in permanent conflict with their respective metropolitan states and the international order sanctioned by the West. This is why the breakaway republics’ sponsor states, Armenia and Russia, are in permanent conflict with the respective metropolitan states.

Thus, of the Eastern European countries, only Belarus and Ukraine have followed peaceful development trajectories, though their paths are quite dissimilar. Belarus, the first European dictatorship in the twenty-first century, has almost doubled its GDP per capita (in fixed prices) in comparison to 1991 levels, while politically vibrant and pluralist Ukraine still has not returned to its 1991 level. However, before 2014, Ukrainian citizens were not subject to any outright censorship, mass political repressions, or persistent authoritarian rule.

But the internal political conflict in Kyiv in the winter of 2013–2014 created opportunity and space for the emergence of vast geostrategic processes that have changed Ukraine’s trajectory of peaceful development. Russia used the moment to annex Crimea and to support radical secession movements in the Donbas. The political groups that won in the conflict with President Yanukovych promoted the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (which entered into full force on 1 September 2017) and restored the political legitimacy of the Ukrainian government in 2014 through the presidential and parliamentary elections.

The conflict with the secessionist paramilitary groups turned into full-fledged war in the Donbas. In August–September 2014 and in February–March 2015 Russian troops entered Ukraine’s territory to provide support to the secessionists. Simultaneously the Ukrainian army, with the support of the United States and other NATO member states, undertook rapid security reforms and developed its capacity to defend the rest of the country.

Today, Kyiv does not control Crimea and the eastern Donbas, territories where more than 4 million Ukrainian citizens live. The frontier between government-controlled Ukraine and the secessionist polities, the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic (LPR and DPR), is a mixture of front line and de facto border. Here, more than 75,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces troops and more than 20,000 Ukrainian security personnel face about 40,000 LPR-DPR troops and over 1,000 Russian senior and mid-rank officers. Both sides invest a lot in the training and arming of their military. Several hundred miles of the front line in two places, near Donetsk and Mariupol, have seen ongoing military action, with a growing toll in loss of life among the civilian population and military personnel on both sides (see SMM reports here).

The military regimes in Luhansk and Donetsk are unstable and unpredictable. The recent coup in Luhansk showed that Kremlin control over the eastern Donbas is not total: local warlords, though tied to Moscow, can act independently, and are also able to use conflicts among the Kremlin-based political groups to their own local purposes.

The Donbas population apparently is adapting to the persistent low-intensity warfare and the lack of security. And despite the economic blockade introduced by Ukraine in early 2017, the divided Donbas community is still showing its unity. As research by the Berlin-based Center for Eastern European and International Studies (ZOiS) has shown, only about 25 percent of the DPR-LPR population feels “more Russian” after the break, while for most of the population (50 percent) the mixed Russian-Ukrainian ethnic and regional identity has not changed. In the government-controlled Donbas, 11 percent of population feels Ukrainian, while identification as Russian also increased somewhat; however, the majority (53 percent) continue to have a mixed ethnic and strong civic Ukrainian identity (for more data, see here).

The border with Crimea is also a source of permanent tensions. There are no shootings here, but from time to time local military personnel are either captured or arrested. Russia is stockpiling weapons on the annexed peninsula. Local populations that had become accustomed to Ukrainian political pluralism and media freedoms are having to get used to new ways of conducting their social and political life. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights reports a grave situation with liberties in Crimea. As another recent ZOiS report shows, the Crimean population feels itself isolated from both Ukraine (only 12 percent preserve ties with the mainland) and Russia (only 22 percent have ever traveled to Russia). Regional identity (as opposed to national identity) is growing, and Crimeans’ attitudes toward the development of the region are quite pessimistic.

Mainland Ukraine’s population is also quite pessimistic about the development of war-torn Ukraine. Among the biggest problems Ukrainians identify are the ongoing armed conflict (51 percent), increasing prices for all types of goods and services (37 percent), and low wages (36 percent). Fifty-six percent of Ukrainians support integration with EU; 43 percent support NATO membership and 33 percent are against it (data from here).

Ukraine, Russia, and NATO

On the heels of the military threats, the sovereignty deficit, and social fragmentation, official Kyiv pursues closer ties with NATO and is busy reducing contacts with Russia. Ukraine approved a law on NATO membership as a strategic aim in July 2017. This is the critical legal step toward ending Ukraine’s traditional multivector foreign policy. However, NATO shows no membership perspective for Ukraine so far. Instead, NATO, its member states, and Ukraine increased cooperation intended to augment Ukraine’s defense abilities.

U.S.-Ukrainian cooperation in the areas of defense and economics advanced in 2017. There were expectations that the new U.S. administration would be less inclined to cooperate with Kyiv than the previous administration. However, after several meetingsbetween President Poroshenko and President Trump, cooperation moved forward. The White House endorsed new sanctions against Russia in support of Ukraine’s security. In response, Ukraine started importing U.S. coal and opened up new opportunities for U.S. investment. Washington and Kyiv have started a new era in defense-related cooperation that should make Ukraine less vulnerable to external threats. It is also expected that the United States will start supplying Ukraine with the lethal weapons critical to its defense measures in the East.

Simultaneously, political and defense communication between official Kyiv and Moscow has reached a historical nadir. In a new and contradictory law on the reintegration of the Donbas (approved by the Rada in January 2018), Russia has been declared an occupying state, while the LPR and DPR are recognized as de facto under the occupier’s administration. The Russian leadership has steadfastly maintained its neoimperialist attitude toward Ukraine and derided Kyiv’s cooperation with the West.

Ukraine and Russia have also finalized their infrastructural and economic “divorce”: Russia has completed its rail link circumventing Ukraine in the southeast and has sped up construction of the bridge spanning the Strait of Kerch between Russia and Crimea. Direct flights between Ukraine and Russia have stopped, and train connections may also be halted. Russia’s share in Ukraine’s foreign trade has declined, while Ukraine’s trade with the West has increased.

Ukraine and Europe

Nonetheless, Ukraine’s relations with its European partners have recently become problematic.

Reflecting the societal impacts of war, the ethnonationalist response is on the rise. Even though Russophone populations were equally as involved in Ukraine’s defense as they were in aggressive actions in the Donbas, Kyiv introduced actions limiting the rights of Ukraine’s Russian minority (17 percent of the population) and its Russophone population (21–42 percent, according to different data): new language laws limit the use of Russian in the public sphere (foremost in the mass media) and exclude it as a language of instruction in secondary education.

This latter Secondary Education Law has reignited old conflicts between Kyiv and its Central European neighbors. The Secondary Education Law changes the inclusive norm that allowed Russophone citizens and ethnic minorities to receive instruction at the secondary level in Russian and minority languages. The law has provoked a harsh reaction from Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, and Romania, whose minority populations are part of Ukraine’s multicultural society. The Hungarian ruling group has ginned up this issue into a conflict that not only damages bilateral relations but also creates obstacles to smoothing out Ukraine-NATO and Ukraine-EU relations.

Ukraine faces an even bigger conflict with Warsaw. Traditionally Ukraine’s advocate in the West, Poland today questions the new, nationalist (and arguably anti-Polish) memory policies of Kyiv. Partially in response to Kyiv’s nationalist memory policies and partially as a result of Poland’s own turn toward radical conservatism, Warsaw has introduced a highly controversial anti-Ukrainian law. Warsaw has also created a list of Ukrainian officials forbidden entrance to Poland and the Schengen zone. Ukraine’s reaction to Poland’s moves is also disruptive for Ukrainian-Polish cooperation.

Finally, EU-Ukraine relations have reached their lowest point of the post-Maidan period despite the introduction of the visa-free regime. Both the EU-Ukraine summit in July 2017 and the Eastern Partnership summit in November 2017 showed that Brussels and Kyiv have lost a good share of mutual understanding. During 2017, EU commissioners, diplomats, and experts insisted that Kyiv return to the reform plan envisaged in the Association Agreement. In the fall of 2017 Brussels started using the term “kleptocracy” to describe its partners in Kyiv. In November, EU commissioners suspended the program of financial aid to Ukraine because of unfulfilled promises. Kyiv has slowed liberal reforms and tries to destroy anticorruption institutions and persecute opposition to the Poroshenko regime. Nonetheless, Brussels and Kyiv continue to use the language of friendship while each waits for the other’s next move.

Official Kyiv is currently orienting itself toward solving these five challenges. Ukraine must work to reestablish its sovereignty and unity, which has been dealt a blow by the war, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the political reaction inside country. Cooperation with the United States and the UK (signatories to the Budapest Memorandum), France and Germany (participants in the Normandy talks on Crimea and the Donbas), and NATO at large is key to reducing the injury the country has sustained and increasing Ukraine’s national security.

In December, Ukraine’s Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan made a statement that raised many eyebrows in his country. “We have no reason to travel to Russia,” he told reporters. “There are trains that go to Moscow, but I hope that Ukrzalisnitsia [Ukraine’s railroad company] will reconsider this policy…. We need to convince Ukrainian citizens that there’s no reason to go to Russia.”

Omelyan’s comments are understandable in light of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and barely concealed military operation in the Donbas. But they are disconnected from the surprising truth that millions of Ukrainians travel back and forth every year to the state that is violating their country’s sovereignty.

Omelyan scornfully referred to his fellow citizens visiting relatives in Russia, but in fact Ukrainians are more likely to go as migrant workers (zarobitchane, from the Ukrainian zarobitok, “wages”). Ukraine’s Statistical Agency estimates that around 4.6 million Ukrainians are working abroad, legally and illegally. That is fully 25 percent of Ukraine’s economically active population.

Migrant work has been an outlet for Ukrainian workers since the 1990s, and became much more widespread after the destructive economic crisis of 2008. Traditionally the majority of zarobitchane hailed from Ukraine’s rural West and migrated both to the EU and to Russia. In 2010 the author lived for several months in a small town in the Carpathian Mountains where almost every household had a relative driving a truck in Poland or working as a nanny in Portugal. Later I met Carpathian zarobitchane working as loggers in the Russian Far East. Ukrainians also are found in the thousands on Moscow’s construction sites and in the oil fields of the north.

Relatively fewer eastern Ukrainians joined the labor migration. But as the industrial economy is depressed by armed conflict and Russia’s trade war with Ukraine, more and more easterners are taking to migrant work. Today I live in the city of Severodonetsk in the government-controlled half of Luhansk oblast, where the massive chemical plant is idled and every wall is plastered with advertisements for buses to Moscow, Rostov, St. Petersburg, and Sochi. These buses are a frequent site in the region’s rural north, where work is especially thin.

But Donbas zarobitchne are also joining the massive labor exodus to Poland, where nearly a million Ukrainians have been officially employed in the past two years. Indeed, experts disagree as to whether Poland or Russia is absorbing the most Ukrainian workers. In a 2016 survey, 36 percent of zarobitchane said they went to Poland to work (45 percent of westerners, 13 percent of easterners) and 25 percent said they went to Russia (14 percent of westerners, 50 percent of easterners). But fully 29 percent of respondents declined to name the country they work in. It is probable that many of them work in Russia but decline to say so because of the political sensitivity.

Espionage and Remittances

The role of zarobitchane is controversial within and outside Ukraine. Both Moscow and Warsaw enjoy counting these migrants as refugees, the former to demonstrate how unbearable life has supposedly become in Ukraine after the Euromaidan revolution, the latter to explain to the EU why Poland doesn’t accept refugees from North Africa and the Middle East.

Vasyl Hritsak, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), warns darkly that Russia’s security services attempt to recruit 90 percent of zarobitchane. Many Ukrainians are troubled by the thought that hundreds of thousands of their countrymen are participating in the Russian economy. The journalist Iulia Samaeva wrote, “It’s hard to get one’s head around the fact that some men are heading off to the Donbas as military volunteers, while others are heading off to be construction workers in Rostov.… There are women who fall to their knees for the funeral procession of a neighbor killed in the war but who will let their husbands go to be plasterers in Smolensk without a second thought.”

I asked Andrey, a wallpaper hanger from Severodonetsk who works informally in Moscow and St. Petersburg, whether his neighbors at home criticize him for working in Russia in wartime. “No,” he answers, “everybody understands we’re all surviving as we can.”

In the midst of Ukraine’s profound economic crisis, remittances from zarobitchane in both the EU and Russia are one of the primary sources of liquidity in the country. In 2016 remittances were almost double the level of foreign investment (U.S. $7 billion versus $3.6 billion). These figures were cited by the Ukrainian daily Sevodnya, which also stated that remittances account for 6 percent of Ukrainian GDP and are responsible for stabilizing the hryvnia-dollar exchange rate.

But according to the International Organization for Migration, for every dollar Ukrainian zarobitchane send home, $2.40 remains in their host country. Vice-Prime Minister Hennadiy Zubko has asked how Ukraine will finance its social safety net when so much of the GDP being generated by working-age Ukrainians is going into other countries’ economies. The outflow of migrant workers from Luhansk oblast is skewing that region’s demographic profile: potential workers constitute only 49 percent of the population, while children, students, the elderly, and women on maternity leave make up most of the remainder. These groups all draw on social programs that must be financed by a dwindling workforce.

Labor outmigration might be reaching such a scale that it is actually compensating for the large loss in industrial jobs in Ukraine since the start of the war. I frequently hear from factory managers in the Donbas that they cannot find enough welders, machine and lathe operators. The huge metallurgy plants that dominate the port city of Mariupol used to turn away many applicants but today must advertise on billboards throughout the city to drum up enough workers. With visa-free travel both to Russia and to Poland, where monthly salaries are three to four times higher than in Ukraine, some Ukrainian employers find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Organize and Invest

With so many zarobitchane working abroad informally, abuse by unscrupulous employers is inevitable. Guest workers in Poland have even formed their own labor union, Trudova Solidarnist, and held their first strike in Warsaw to protest withheld wages. Ukrainians in Russia are certainly not immune to this problem. Andrey from Severodonetsk rattles off the sums he was not paid by employers: “200, 300, 400 dollars, the last time was 600 or 700.” He adds that in today’s Russian economy even local workers can be left in the lurch. “You really have to know where you’re headed to, you have to know your employer, otherwise—kidayut [they cheat you].”

Considering the growing role of labor migration in their economy, Ukrainians would do well to study experiments in other Eastern European countries that aim to turn migrants into investors. In Moldova, where remittances make up 23 percent of GDP, the Program for Attracting Remittances into the Economy (PARE 1+1) matches investments by labor migrants into micro and small business with government funds. In five years this has resulted in U.S. $20 million in investment and the creation of 1,336 jobs. The International Organization for Migration found that only 1 percent of remittances from Ukrainian zarobitchane are invested, despite the desire of many of these individuals to develop businesses in their home communities. Activating these entrepreneurial aspirations could gradually reduce the need for Ukrainians to look east of their own borders, or for that matter west, for a decent living.

]]>465Freedom of Speech: Between Power and Truth in Ukrainehttps://www.kennan-focusukraine.org/freedom-of-speech-between-power-and-truth-in-ukraine/
Fri, 02 Feb 2018 14:31:20 +0000http://www.kennan-focusukraine.org/?p=456

BY MARYNA STAVNIICHUK

As 2018 opens, Ukraine faces many painful problems: conflict in the Donbas, weakening ties with Ukrainian communities in the separatist-controlled eastern Donbas and the Russia-controlled Crimea, endemic corruption, and disruptive social reforms. And the list of major challenges for Ukraine has recently been enriched with the decline of freedom of speech and of the media.

The first reaction of my friends and colleagues to that statement is disbelief. Are our media freedoms that endangered?

Let’s look at the situation together.

The Index of Physical Security of Journalists, published by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) on January 4, 2018, identified ninety cases of attacks on journalists in Ukraine in 2017. That number represents an unprecedented and unacceptable level of aggression.

However, according to the 2017 World Press Freedom Index (WPFI), Ukraine rose five places in the listing and is now 102nd among 180 countries. Reporters Without Borders (RWB) explained that this “improvement” was connected to the decreased number of attacks on journalists in 2016 (their statistics appear outdated). And the rest of the RWB indicators showed that freedom of speech is far from flourishing in Ukraine. There is a solid body of evidence that media owners put pressure on editors to change editorial policy according to their political agenda; and that state authorities, acting through oligarchic owners, increased their control of television channels. Corruption and nepotism are mentioned as separate problems that also affect freedom of speech.

Thus, based on the NUJU’s data on level of aggression against journalists and other data from the WPFI, it appears Ukraine indeed has problems with freedom of speech and of the media.

Freedom of speech is fundamental to a healthy society and a vibrant democracy. It is critical for constraining elites’ behavior and to prevent the government from making mistakes and help it return to the correct course. Ukrainians enjoyed freedom of speech in the wake of independence in the early 1990s and as a result of the Orange revolution in 2004. Naturally, we expected it to be restored after the 2013–2014 Euromaidan.

Instead, in 2017 we ended up with a situation only too reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s beloved anti-Soviet anecdote:

An American says: “I can walk into the White House, slam my fist on the desk, and say: ‘Mr. President, I do not like how you govern the country!’”

A Soviet man responds: “I can do it as well!”

“Can you really?” says the American in surprise.

“Sure! I can walk into the Kremlin, slam my fist on the desk, and say: ‘Comrade Secretary General, I do not like how Mr. Reagan is governing his country!’”

I must admit that in today’s Ukraine—in some surviving political debates on TV channels with a 2 or 3 percent viewership share—one can still criticize the way authorities govern the country. However, most Ukrainians are cut off from these channels. The critical debate does not penetrate Ukrainian society. The public dialogue representing different opinions and arguments has no infrastructure in the media that most reach the public.

After 2014, the biggest TV channels that provide Ukrainians with politically relevant information dramatically decreased their political content to a minimum. And the smaller outlets, such as ZIK, 112.TV, or News One, have reported being subjected to political pressure or actual violence. This pressure is only growing, now forcing the editor-in-chief of the popular opposition outlet to seek asylum in Austria. Before the presidential elections of 2019, the ruling groups want to quietly subdue and entrain the information channels to serve their interests. The authorities are busy constructing their own, comfortable information world, constantly broadcasting their “achievements” to the masses.

This parallel reality has been created through tightening control over the media and the use of post-truth tools, that is, the emotional evaluation and false interpretations of facts. The authorities then use this platform of a notionally free press to amplify their own interests: to assure the citizenry of their achievements, accuse opposition leaders and groups of betraying the national interest, organize “witch hunts,” and engage in other actions that destroy even the hint of critical thinking in my country.

A good example is the campaign against the ZIK television channel, which recently interviewed Andrii Portnov, a former legal adviser to run-away president Yanukovych (in the official view, anyone connected to the former government is regarded as tainted). In another example, on December 3, 2017, radical right groups blockaded the entrance to the Kyiv office of the NewsOne television channel with sandbags and barbed wire, possibly because the channel was showing Saakashvili-led protests, though the trigger most likely was an alternative assessment of the Euromaidan by the broadcaster’s owner. Last year was marked by a long list of atrocities committed against free speech in Ukraine, including tightened control over social media and suppression of discussion of the government’s campaign to weaken medical and pension reforms and the Poroshenko administration’s campaign against Ukraine’s Western partners and their requests for anticorruption policies. Attempts at civil resistance to the worsening situation with respect to media freedoms are by and large ineffective.

All of this has attracted the attention of Western governments to the larger issue of the weakening and increasingly problematic governance of Ukraine.

For example, the issue of anticorruption policies and the suppression of their discussion in Ukrainian society was raised by U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in her recent op-ed, posted on the embassy’s website. Her question—”Is the courage to move Ukraine forward faltering” four years after the Maidan?— is being asked by many in Ukraine as well.

In the EU, there are also voices of concern with regard to the situation in Ukraine. Gustav Gressel, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, stated: “The central demands of the revolution of dignity were to transform Ukraine into a country that respects the rule of law, treats its citizens equally and respectfully, and puts checks and balances in place to prevent the unlawful enrichment of political elites. Poroshenko and his government have failed miserably regarding all of these demands…. European leaders should not provide geopolitical fig-leaves for this regression.”

Indeed, in the opinion of many observers, Ukraine has moved from the Revolution of Dignity to a Government of Shame.

It was in 2017 that I realized how easy it is now for the ruling groups to spread fake news and post-truth myths. En masse, our media have once again lost their role of a social institution with the mission of supporting a meaningful national dialogue.

Truth has become a key demand in Ukraine, on par with the demand for security. The truth is a resource for the socioeconomic reconstruction and democratic development of my country. Trust—between the governors and those governed, between Ukraine and its partners in the West—is critical for Ukrainians’ collective progress. And with truth in deficit, no trust is possible.

Today Ukraine, a nation at war with Russia, is entering an electoral period. Next year we will have presidential and parliamentary elections. As Ukrainians inform themselves of their choices and prepare to select who will represent and govern them, the issue of freedom of speech and of the media becomes even more consequential. For elections to be free and transparent, restoration of these freedoms is critical. Otherwise the fight for the right to slam one’s fist on the rulers’ desk may turn into a wave of huge and destructive protests.

]]>456Why and How the United States Can Help Ukraine Strengthen Its Chemical Securityhttps://www.kennan-focusukraine.org/why-and-how-the-united-states-can-help-ukraine-strengthen-its-chemical-security/
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 15:31:08 +0000http://www.kennan-focusukraine.org/?p=445

Explosion at the ammunition depots in Balakliia (March 2017)www.mil.gov.ua

BY IRYNA IAREMA

Almost from the onset of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, many organizations have called for action to reduce the risk of shelling of industrial sites containing chemicals. Protecting chemical facilities across Ukraine is a no less important task. This can be explained by many reasons.

The State Emergency Service of Ukraine counts approximately 900 chemically dangerous sites in Ukraine. Although many are located in Donetsk region, regions such as Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv cumulatively accommodate more facilities where chemicals are produced, used, or stored in large quantities. Ukraine’s national legislation does not explicitly require operators of chemical facilities to install security measures. However, Ukraine’s low security rating on the 2017 Global Terrorism Index, owing to disturbingly frequent security incidents, indicates the need to tighten security at Ukraine’s critical infrastructure sites.

Whereas in the East, ceasefire violation monitoring by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) might help trace and consequently deter a deliberate or negligent attack against chemical installations, difficulties with attribution, as showcased by the explosions in the ammunition depots near Kharkiv and Vinnytsya, can add a stimulus for malevolent actors to employ chemicals or perpetrate sabotage against chemical plants in a government-controlled area of Ukraine. This could damage national security and the economy and destabilize the political climate in the country, and therefore necessitates the enactment of stringent security measures.

As the United States has a real interest in preserving Ukraine’s economic viability and continues to be a significant contributor to Ukraine’s national security, assisting in enhancing the country’s chemical security is a logical path to follow. It would help the United States secure its borders from the chemical menace by limiting unauthorized access to chemical materials and preventing them from falling into terrorists’ hands inside countries where state control over dual-use materials[1] and facilities is fragmented. To maximize gains for the United States and Ukraine, American actions in the chemical security domain should encompass both legislative and institutional assistance, as well as increased visibility about its actions.

Legislative Assistance

The United States has a good track record implementing chemical security legislation. The Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS), initially authorized by Congress in 2007, were developed to prevent the intentional misuse of chemicals through theft, sabotage, or attack and thus to improve overall security in the country.[2] As per CFATS regulations, a chemical facility that uses any of the Chemicals of Interest (COI) in certain quantities established by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in addition to reporting and maintaining comprehensive records of COI, is required to develop and implement site security plans. The United States has a four-tier system for classifying chemical facilities based on estimated security risk. Tier 1 represents the highest risk. The DHS performs regular inspections of high-risk chemical establishments to ensure that security measures are in place.

Ukraine also has a methodology for chemical facilities classification, but in contrast to the one described above, determination of the risk level is based on the consequences of an inadvertent chemical incident. Chemical sites are categorized in four classes depending on the size of the population potentially affected by an emergency. In other words, classification is done based on estimated safety risk; potential danger from an intentional malevolent act is not considered.

To address this, a starting point for Ukraine would be to make an inventory of chemicals and establishments that should be covered by chemical security legislation and correlate them with the CFATS COI list. This list, in addition to dual-use chemicals (also controlled by Ukraine), includes toxic and flammable chemicals, chemicals that can create “weapons of mass effect,” and other chemicals conducive to sabotage.

Overhauling the classification of high-risk facilities is also required, and the moment is just right. Ukraine is in the process of implementing Directive 2012/18/EU on the control of major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances (Seveso III Directive), as stipulated by the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. Integrating obligations pertinent to chemical security into the body of Ukrainian legislation harmonized with the Seveso III Directive might generate quite complex regulation. However, in the end, it will help avoid unnecessary administrative burdens caused by having to undergo a similar lengthy lawmaking process in the future and, most important, buttress security in the country.

Institutional Support

Ukraine lacks a coordinating agency to spearhead chemical security, diluting attention to the problem. The National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine, which includes the heads of the law enforcement ministries in Ukraine, might be a good candidate to elevate the chemical security agenda to the appropriate strategic level. The precedent is there: a commission on biosecurity and bioprotection was recently established under the NSDC. Why not use the momentum for chemical security? For example, in the United States, chemical and biological threats are regarded in the same weapons of mass destruction (WMD) portfolio in the recently created special office in the DHS.

To act in a similar fashion, Ukraine needs an impetus, and the United States has leverage. For example, before embarking on the path associated with the chemical security legislative assistance program described above, the United States could set a condition on Ukraine to establish a coordinating body and divide labor pertaining to day-to-day chemical security functions between respective executive bodies with sufficient human and administrative resources. Here, peer support from the United States in setting up an inspection office would be instrumental for Ukraine, where positive experience is as important as the challenges and problems faced.

Such an arrangement could be a win-win solution. It would help the United States safeguard the effectiveness and sustainability of aid provided and would challenge the possible perception of the United States as a donor that merely dumps equipment on Ukraine. For Ukraine, it would help prepare the groundwork for an advanced security reform.

Increased Visibility and Outreach

Preventing terrorists and rogue states from accessing and using WMD has long been at the forefront of U.S. policy; the 2010–2016 U.S.-led Nuclear Security Summit process is an example. At the same time, chemical sector security summits organized by the United States do not enjoy that much publicity and are smaller in scale and scope. Boosting the image of the United States as a global WMD nonproliferation and security actor requires actions in the field where the impact would be discernible. Launching state-of-the art chemical security assistance projects for Ukraine, for example, would pay back not only in increased security but also geopolitical dividends to the United States and—what is salient—with no moral hazards. This fits well in the realm of international law.

Already in 2004, some years after 9/11, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously adopted Resolution 1540, obliging states “to refrain from supporting by any means non-State actors from developing, acquiring, manufacturing, possessing, transporting, transferring or using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.” In this context, assisting Ukraine in enhancing the country’s chemical security would help Ukraine fulfill its obligations under UNSC Resolution 1540 (2004) and Resolution 2325 (2016). The latter specifically calls on all states to intensify efforts to achieve full implementation of resolution 1540 (2004) and encourages states “to contribute funds, on a voluntary basis, to finance projects and activities … to assist States in implementing their obligations under resolution 1540 (2004).”

For Ukraine, which lags behind in aspects of critical infrastructure security, a chemical security assistance program would provide an opportunity to amend the status quo by building organizational security architecture in high-risk establishments. Although the United States has long played a huge role in supporting reforms in Ukraine, it has not always received proper public recognition. Therefore, greater outreach efforts should be made to send a positive signal to the international and local community and help them acknowledge progress in this area. During the next session of the Verkhovna Rada, starting on February 6, 2018, the Ukrainian parliament will be largely preoccupied with reform of the security and defense sector of Ukraine, and Ukraine would welcome further cooperation with the EU and NATO countries. The area of infrastructure security is a natural one for further bilateral efforts, as the United States, together with the EU, already is supporting the OSCE’s chemical safety and security projects. Now is the right time to enlarge the scope and scale of the effort.

[2] Before 2015, President Obama signed into law the CFATS Act of 2014, which recodifies and reauthorizes the CFATS program for four years. This was done after a positive outcome of the review of the effectiveness of the program.

In the second part of 2017 calm generally prevailed in Ukraine in the foreign policy arena, with some light turbulence. The new law on education caused tension and discussion both inside Ukraine and among neighboring states. Though Ukraine-Western relations exhibited positive, even critical advances, especially in U.S.-Ukraine relations, Ukraine’s internal politics experienced some turmoil, chiefly related to Mikheil Saakashvili’s actions after President Poroshenko signed the decree revoking his Ukrainian citizenship and the response of the West, which saw in the decree a violation of international norms precluding the arbitrary cancellation of citizenship.

1. FOREIGN POLICY ISSUES

Ukraine-U.S. Relations

On July 9, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Kyiv and met with President Petro Poroshenko. Before that meeting, Secretary Tillerson met with younger-generation leaders from government and civil society. With the young reformers, the secretary mostly spoke about battling corruption and the provision of international aid for Ukraine; with the president he discussed security issues and Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Battling corruption was also on the agenda during Poroshenko’s and Donald Trump’s meeting on September 21 in New York, where both presidents took part in the 72nd Regular Session of the UN General Assembly.

New U.S. Special Representative

On July 7, Secretary Tillerson appointed Kurt Volker, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations. Ambassador Volker and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, accompanied by U.S. and Ukrainian officials, visited the Donbas. Mr. Volker said that the conflict in the Donbas was not frozen but a hot war.

Sanctions and Resistance to Russia’s Energy Influence

On July 27 the U.S. Congress passed, and on August 2 President Trump signed, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which imposed new sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The act also recognizes Ukrainian territorial integrity and Russia’s responsibility for the annexation of Crimea and the illegal invasion of eastern Ukraine and South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.

Section 257 of the act is dedicated to strengthening Ukrainian energy security, in part by helping Ukraine and other U.S. allies in the region reduce their reliance on energy imports from the Russian Federation. As the act states, Russia “uses [natural gas] as a weapon to coerce, intimidate, and influence other countries.” It should be noted that U.S. interest in strengthening Ukraine’s energy security is not a new development; it was among the key points enumerated in the United States–Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, signed on December 19, 2008.

It is true that before 2013, Ukraine was critically dependent on Russian supplies of energy resources, services, and technologies. In that context, Russia was the sole supplier of gas to Ukraine. Since November 2015, however, Ukraine has imported gas only from the EU. Of course, most of that gas was supplied to the EU by Gazprom, but diversifying the delivery routes decreased opportunities for Russia to affect Ukraine and influence its policies. Much the same thing happened with nuclear fuel imports: before 2014, Russia was the only supplier, but later Ukraine started buying from Westinghouse’s Swedish division. In 2016 the share of Russian supplies was only 61 percent of Ukraine’s total imports of nuclear fuel, and Russia’s share continues to fall. It’s likely that diversification has also been responsible for the price decline: in 2013, Ukraine consumed 369.36 tons of Russia-sourced nuclear fuel, at a cost of U.S. $600.59 million; for 2016 those figures were 450.49 tons variably sourced at a cost of $548.7 million.

For many years Ukraine was self-sufficient with respect to coal supplies. But after the beginning of the military conflict in the Donbas, a region responsible for the greatest part of coal extraction in the country, Ukrainian companies had to import anthracite coal. To some extent Russia is also responsible for the disruption of coal supplies, as it is supporting and backing groups of armed separatists illegally acting in the Donbas who have seized control of coal mines and other enterprises in the region.

According to Section 257 of the 2017 U.S. sanctions act, the Government of Ukraine, in cooperation with the United States Agency for International Development and the U.S. secretary of energy and secretary of state, is to develop a plan to improve Ukrainian energy security. The plan is to be presented in early 2018. The act also stipulates an appropriation of $30 million during the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years for carrying out activities related to Ukrainian energy security. The Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation will play important roles in supporting key Ukrainian energy projects that contribute to the goal of achieving energy security. In addition, Section 257 prioritizes efforts to stop the NordStream 2 pipeline and increase exports of U.S. energy resources in order to support U.S. allies and create jobs in the United States.

U.S. Coal for Ukraine

President Poroshenko, during his visit to Washington, D.C., and his meeting with Donald Trump in June 2017, discussed the possible U.S. provision of coal supplies to Ukraine. Later, on July 31, the Ukrainian state-owned power-generating company Centrenergo PJSC and the privately held U.S. company Xcoal Energy and Resources signed a deal for 700,000 tons of Pennsylvania anthracite—the first-ever shipment of energy coal from the United States to Ukraine. The agreement was presented as a strong contribution to Ukrainian energy security by President Poroshenko and other officials. Though the price of $113 per ton for the first shipment was comparatively high, in Ukraine, the president is not responsible for managing the business deals of state-owned companies. The U.S. coal supplies story is different from the nuclear fuel one: as mentioned above, the latter has definitely proved beneficial, whereas the coal supplies story is attended by some uncertainty. This case was discussed earlier in more detail, including some thoughts on the political reasons to strike a deal.

The Pentagon

General James Mattis, U.S. secretary of defense and Pentagon chief, visited Ukraine on August 24, the Ukrainian independence day, and met with President Poroshenko. During the press conference following the meeting General Mattis and Ukraine’s president both spoke about priorities and negotiations in the Donbas, including the possibility of having a UN peacemaking mission there.

Ukraine-NATO Developments

On July 6, President Poroshenko signed a law (approved by parliament on June 8) to prioritize the integration of Ukraine with NATO. Ukraine now must move forward to meet NATO’s standards. Later, on July 10, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, visited Ukraine to participate in the NATO-Ukraine Commission session. The main points of Stoltenberg’s address to parliament were not unique: along with other Western officials, he spoke of the need to battle the “cancer of corruption,” while also recognizing Ukraine’s progress in this arena. Mr. Stoltenberg promised that NATO would continue supporting Ukraine and would provide equipment to help Ukraine withstand cyberattacks; he also stressed the need to implement the Minsk agreements. During his visited he participated in the opening of the new NATO office in Kyiv.

Relations with the EU

On September 1, the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, including the free trade provisions, came into full force (parts of it had been implemented before that date). A lot remains to be done to shape Ukrainian legislation in accordance with European laws, as stipulated by the agreement. About 600 European legislative acts must be implemented in Ukraine by 2025. The process is on track but behind schedule. According to the Ukrainian vice prime minister for European integration, in 2016 Ukraine was to implement 130 EU directives, but only 26 were completely implemented—a notable shortfall.

Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement

The Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement came into force on August 1. It was the second such agreement but the first to be signed and implemented after the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014. Increasing Ukrainian exports is of great importance, chiefly because of the decline in trade with Russia after the start of the Russian Federation’s aggression toward Ukraine. Key Ukrainian products that will benefit from a tariff-free access to Canadian markets include agricultural products, manufactured goods, ceramics, minerals, iron and steel, baked goods, and apparel.

New Law on the Language of Education

On September 25, President Poroshenko signed a new law on education that had been passed by parliament on September 5. Besides the list of changes mandated by the law, it caused tension with neighboring states because of the policy regarding the language of education. The law stipulates the full right and absolute freedom for national minorities to study in their native languages in the early school years. However, beginning with secondary schooling, the language of education should be the official one, Ukrainian. The logic behind this ruling was that representatives of ethnic minorities without a strong knowledge of Ukrainian would have difficulty living and building careers outside their ethnic communities. The larger framework within which the law was conceived was to provide equal rights in the future for all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or national community. But the law has ignited a heated discussion inside Ukraine (see here for another article on this issue) and tension with neighboring states that have populations living in Ukraine, including Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

The Hungarian parliament has criticized the law, and the country lodged protests against it with the UN, the OSCE, and the EU. The main argument was that the law restricted the rights of Hungarians living in Zakarpattia oblast. On September 21, the Romanian president canceled his visit to Ukraine because of the law. The president of Moldova also expressed concern over the new language of education requirements. At the same time, some countries, such as the United States, supported the law, and some even supported the language policy paragraph, as Latvia did. However, by the end of 2017, Ukraine had managed to negotiate with neighboring countries on this issue, as the next quarterly update will discuss.

2. INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Saakashvili: From Love to Hate

On July 27, the State Migration Service of Ukraine announced that Mikheil Saakashvili’s citizenship had been revoked through a presidential decree canceling a previous decision granting partial citizenship. The formal cause for the decision was that Saakashvili had omitted mention of his previous convictions on his application for Ukrainian citizenship. Saakashvili said that the signature on the application was forged. However, he did not try to litigate the decision in court for a long time. And President Poroshenko, as was his custom, remained silent on the matter for some time and did not comment on signing the decree. One and half months later he said that law enforcement authorities had had to deal with Saakashvili’s behavior and actions, and that not signing the decree would have been a crime because of Saakashvili’s failure to provide truthful information on his citizenship application.

Saakashvili acquired Ukrainian citizenship on May 30, 2015—the same day that Poroshenko appointed him governor of Odesa oblast, a not particularly honorable position for a former president of a country. But it was obvious that he wanted (and still wants) to pursue a political career in Ukraine. A couple of days before his citizenship was revoked, on July 21, the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice registered the political Movement of New Forces, with Saakashvili as its head. Ukrainian elites did not like Saakashvili’s intention, mostly because of his tendency to criticize, his hot temper, and his unpredictability. However, according to Ukrainian legislation, Saakashvili could not run for president (ten years of residency in Ukraine is a prerequisite to became a candidate).

On November 7, 2016, Saakashvili resigned from the Odesa regional administration. He had not been especially successful in that role and blamed his failure on corruption, including at the top level. Despite his remarkable popularity when he first arrived in Ukraine, mostly because of his achievements in Georgia, it had fallen considerably by the time Poroshenko signed the decree. However, the revocation of Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship acted to boost his popularity again, because some regarded the act as of a piece with Poroshenko’s attempts to strip his opponents of power and salience.

The arc of Proshenko’s friendship with Saakashvili may have found a mirror in Saakashvili’s political fortunes. Before the decision was made to cancel his citizenship, Saakashvili had never attributed corruption to Poroshenko personally or articulated any personal grievances with him. When the president did finally comment on the decision, he said it was just an answer to information from and a request by the State Migration Service of Ukraine. His framing it in this manner made it appear that he was just doing his job correctly. But to observers, it was clear that Poroshenko, who almost two years earlier had called Saakashvili his close friend and reliable partner, at that moment was annoyed with him.

The citizenship cancelation decree appeared when Saakashvili was not in Ukraine; he was traveling in the United States and Poland and intended to return to Ukraine despite losing his citizenship. On September 10, Saakashvili, accompanied by a group of members of parliament, civil activists, and journalists, attempted to enter Ukraine from Poland. Another group of sympathizers was waiting for him in Ukraine at the border control checkpoint. Police and the National Guardsmen were waiting there as well. The main task of those forces remained unclear, whether it was to ensure legal procedures were followed and to prevent disorder or to keep Saakashvili from entering Ukraine. However, the police forces and border troops did not abuse their powers, even though they could have legally used force insofar as Saakashvili and the others with him were violating border crossing procedures, and some of his companions sought to provoke officials by making disparaging remarks.

Once back in Ukraine, Saakashvili realized the risk of being sent back to Georgia by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities. Georgia had previously issued a few requests for the criminal extradition of Saakashvili (which, incidentally, undercuts Poroshenko’s argument, as the charges were publicly known at the time of Saakashvili’s application for ). However, Ukrainian authorities had refused all such requests. In early September Georgia’s General Prosecutor’s Office sent one more request. However, Saakashvili stayed in Ukraine and was not forced to go back to Georgia by Ukrainian authorities.

An aggravating factor in Saakashvili’s case was that he had violated legal procedures for entering Ukraine. Surrounded by his supporters, Saakashvili actually broke through the border without clearing customs and border control or adhering to standard protocols for entering Ukraine. That same day President Poroshenko called this step breaking the law, and Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov said that after the incident, Saakashvili had to register his entry into Ukraine in order to make his situation legal. So top Ukrainian officials refrained from escalating the incident at that time. However, a couple of people who had accompanied Saakashvili across the border were found guilty of violating the law. Later, on September 22, the court in Lviv oblast (close to the border control checkpoint) fined Saakashvili 3,400 UAH (about U.S. $125) for his illegal border crossing.

In sum, Saakashvili irritated a lot people through his “expressive” behavior and outspokenness, and he violated the law when crossing the border. He did not challenge the decision to revoke his citizenship in court for a long time. Nonetheless, in the third quarter of 2017 Ukrainian officials adopted a moderate stance toward Saakashvili and his actions.

Garbage Politics in Ukraine

On July 14, the city council of Lviv, the biggest city in western Ukraine, announced that the city’s garbage disposal problem was solved and the city had been cleaned of trash. Lviv had suffered from overflowing garbage collection sites for more than a year, after the city’s only landfill caught fire. However, it was not just a technical problem of garbage disposal. Rather, the situation resulted from a political clash between President Poroshenko and Lviv’s mayor, Andrii Sadovyi, who is also the head of the political party Samopomich (see here for more details on the case). The Lviv city administration suspected officials accountable to President Poroshenko of blocking the removal of garbage from the city. It appears that Poroshenko’s team expected the garbage debacle would destroy Sadovyi’s image as an effective mayor and a politician who stood in opposition to the president and his team. Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman blamed Mr. Sadovyi for inefficient management, and members of parliament representing Poroshenko’s party even appealed to Sadovyi to resign; those requests stopped after the garbage issue was resolved.

Naftogaz and the Government: Mutual Recriminations

On September 19, two members of the independent supervisory board of the state-owned Ukrainian energy giantNaftogaz issued a statement announcingtheir intention to resign. Two weeks earlier another member hadannouncedhis wish to resign by the end of the month. That was remarkable news. Naftogaz is one of the biggest companies in Ukraine, certainly the country’s biggest energy operator, and in recent months the biggest taxpayer into state coffers. Moreover, the board members cited as one of the mainreasonsfor resigning the government’s obstruction of reforms. Prime Minister Groysmanrespondedthat Naftogaz was a monopoly and, in keeping with the EU guidelines along which Ukraine’s new gas market law was drawn up, had to be broken up despite any attempts to resist this move. Conflicts between the management of Naftogaz and Groysman are nothing new but equally are far from over, and are connected to political battles. You can read about this case in more detail in another article written by the author.

3. PROGRESS IN REFORMS AND SUCCESS STORIES

Ukrainian Banking System Reforms

The Ukrainian banking system recorded a profit in August. Total net profit during the first eight months of 2017 amounted to UAH 3.429 billion (about U.S. $129 million), the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said. In the same period in 2016 the banking system recorded a net loss of UAH 3.652 billion. Among the most important reasons why the banking system turned profitable was the clean-up policy pursued by the NBU during 2016–2017. As part of the process, PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, which faced a multibillion-dollar shortfall, was nationalized and recapitalized, and a new monetary policy targeting inflation was implemented. The results have been dramatic. In the first half of 2016, net losses from the Ukrainian banking system amounted to UAH 1.85 billion. In the first nine months of 2017, by contrast, Ukrainian banks generated UAH 1.41 billion in net profit.

Reform of Ukrainian Government Service

On August 18, the Ukrainian government adopted a couple of decisions that launched the reform of the government service system. The European Union will support this reform with a grant of more than €100 million. The reform stipulates starting new departments in ministries, to be known as directorates, that will aid in implementing reforms. Professionals and experts on reforms will be hired to work in the directorates. The reforms will start with pilot programs in ten current ministries and are expected to be completed by mid-2018.

4. THE SITUATION IN DONBAS

Occupied Territories without Electricity Supplies

On July 26, the single Ukrainian electricity transmission operator, the state-owned National Power Company Ukrenergo, stopped supplying electricity to the non-government-controlled areas of and Luhansk oblasts. The official reason for this step was that the electricity previously supplied to the uncontrolled areas had not been paid for. After the cutoff, the occupied territories were to be supplied by energy stations located inside those territories and directly by Russia.

New Pseudo-State?

On July 18, the leader of illegal militants in the non-government-controlled part of Donetsk oblast proposed the creation of a state, to be called Malorosiia (literally “Small Russia,” that is, comprising Ukrainian territories associated with Russian aggression). That illegal formation was to include nineteen other regions of Ukraine. As the separatists’ leader said, that should solve the “crisis.”

On the one hand, such statements by the separatists are not worth paying attention to; on the other hand, disregarding them could be interpreted as losing interest in the Ukrainian problem, which could lead to further destabilization. So the representatives of many countries made statements about the illegality of such intentions while also pointing that such statements didn’t merit attention. Later, the militants rejected the idea of establishing a pseudo-state.

The danger of such statements is that they can act like a mental virus and subtly infect one’s thinking. The idea can be raised again later, when it will somehow seem familiar rather than an outrageous proposition.

The second quarter of 2017 was rather quiet in Ukraine: good news prevailed over bad. Ukrainians obtained the long-awaited visa-free regime with the most of the EU member states, Kyiv successfully hosted the European song competition Eurovision, and the International Monetary Fund agreed to provide another loan tranche. However, little progress was made in the Donbas negotiations and the peacemaking process, and military crises affected the economy.

On April 19, the ICJ returned its verdict. It recognized that Russia had to respond to charges of violating human rights, ensure the rights of Crimean populations, and allow study in school in the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian languages, as well as respect Tatars’ organizations, including their executive body, the Mejlis.

However, the Court was not able to recognize Russia’s role in backing and financing terrorism in Ukraine’s Donbas region because of the lack of inculpatory evidence provided by Ukraine. Thereafter the court did not support Ukrainian demands to force Russia, which de facto controls the border between the two countries in the area of conflict in the Donbas, to stop supplying funding, arms, and militants to illegal military groups, also called terrorists. At the same time, the ICJ recognized its own legitimacy (prima facie) to hear suits regarding Russia’s guilt in not adhering to conventions on preventing terrorism and racial discrimination. The ICJ further appealed to both Russia and Ukraine to meet their obligations under the Minsk agreements.

On May 20, the ICJ in coordination with agents of Ukraine and Russia, set the schedule for the next phases of the suit. Ukraine is to submit its memorandum of charges against Russia on June 12, 2018, and Russia has the same amount of time to submit its response—its counter-memorandum—on July 12, 2019. Those memoranda must represent each party’s arguments and evidence. Thus the case is expected to continue a couple of years more.

On May 31, the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce announced its preliminary decision on the suits between the Ukrainian Naftogaz and Russia’s Gazprom. The arbitration panel rejected Gazprom’s claim that the take-or-pay clause in its contract with Naftogaz should apply. Under the contract, Ukraine had to consume or simply pay for 52 billion cubic meters of gas. However, Ukraine’s current gas demand is much lower, and Naftogaz appealed the legality of the take-or-pay formula. The court postponed announcing its final decision a few times. At the end of 2017, Naftogaz said that it expected a decision on February 28, 2018, regarding the ship-or-pay and take-or-pay provisions in the contract.

Visa-Free Regime: The Final Point

On June 11, Ukrainian citizens acquired the right to visit all the Schengen Zone countries for short-term stays without obtaining visas if they hold a biometric passport. Participation in the visa-free regime had long been promised by Ukrainian authorities and the EU as part of Ukraine’s European integration strategy. The EU officially stipulated that Ukraine had fulfilled all obligations and commitments necessary to participate in the visa-free regime, and it was granted effective June 11, 2017.

U.S.-Ukraine Relations

On May 9, U.S. president Donald Trump signed the spending bill for the 2017 finance year, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017. The act stipulates assigning $150 million to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and more than $450 million in other forms of assistance to Ukraine. The act mentions the importance of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and Georgia, both of which have suffered from Russian illegal actions.

On June 20–21, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko visited the United States and met with Donald Trump and other U.S. officials. The presidents discussed issues of security in Ukraine and military-technical cooperation, energy security, and battling corruption. The U.S. administration confirmed its permanent support for Ukrainian territorial integrity. The U.S. vice president Michael Pence highlighted continuing U.S. support for the Normandy format negotiations to implement the Minsk agreements and stressed the importance of continued reforms to fight corruption, improve Ukraine’s business climate, and keep Ukraine’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) program on track. During his meeting with the head of the U.S. Department of Energy, President Poroshenko discussed collaboration in the nuclear industry and the possibility of the United States supplying gas and coal to Ukraine. The United States is an important partner in the field of nuclear energy; however, its readiness to provide direct energy supplies to Ukraine is unclear

2. Internal Affairs

IMF Loan

In early April 2017 the IMF agreed to a new loan for Ukraine in the amount of $1 billion. The IMF acknowledged signs of Ukraine’s economic recovery and progress in reforming the country but also stated that structural and governance reforms had to be accelerated. Among its main recommendations (which were also conditions for further collaboration between the IMF and Ukraine) were launching pension and health care reforms, continuing the fight against corruption, changing the system for subsidizing households unable to pay for utilities, changing the gas pricing system for households in general, and establishing a land market. Later in the year the Ukrainian government started implementing most of these recommendations with the exception of the land market.

Russian Social Media under a Ban

On May 15, 2017, President Poroshenko issued a decree putting into force the April 28 decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine on sanctions against Russia. Beside other provisions, this decree restricted access to certain Russian websites and social media, including Yandex, VKontakte, and Odnoklassniki, and prohibited trading of the Russian accounting software 1C. The main reason for the prohibitions was to prevent what was viewed as the likely collection of data by Russian security services, Ukrainian foreign affairs minister Pavlo Klimkin said. His argument was that Russia uses the internet, including social media, in conducting a hybrid war against Ukraine, and the prohibitions against certain social media uses would improve Ukraine’s security. However, the opinion of the expert community was divided: some experts supported the government’s decision, while other saw it as a violation of human rights. The matter is somewhat confusing. Though social media accounts can be used for spearfishing and to launch cyberattacks or collect data, users still can access prohibited sites using anonymizers, such as VPN. Moreover, accessing those websites through alternative means is not prohibited and is not a crime. After the restriction of access to other online services, for example, Ukrainians’ use of Facebook jumped. Thus, evaluating banned social media usage and website visiting is complicated by the availability of workarounds and clouded by issues of rights.

Just Another Round of Cyberattacks

On June 27, Ukrainian IT infrastructure came under a massive cyberattack. The attack was mostly directed toward government and economic sites. However, private users were affected as well. Petya.A (similar to the WannaCry virus, which appeared in May and affected users worldwide), a virus-encrypting ransomware tool, attacked computers and demanded payments. Those responsible for the attack got access to accounting software widely used in Ukraine, M.E.Doc, and embedded the malware into the software’s update. Usage accounting software functioning as a gate made collecting private data possible. However, it was not clear whether the information collected was used after that. Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov and the Security Service of Ukraine reported that Russia was responsible for the cyberattack (which, however, employed an exploit tool stolen from a U.S. National Security site).

3. Reforms and Success Stories

Reforms

Reform of the energy markets was on track in the second quarter of 2017. On April 13 the Verkhovna Rada adopted the law “On the Electricity Market of Ukraine,” which stipulates a wide range of new rules applicable to electricity trading and distribution. In the long run, these rules should make the market more competitive and liberalized. A new model of the electricity market is planned to take effect in 2019; it is based on European practices and norms and intended to be in compliance with the Energy Community Treaty and the “Third Energy Package” of the EU. No longer will a single state-owned enterprise buy all the electricity and resell it to other distributors. Rather, according to the provisions of the law, energy producers will themselves be able to sell on various submarkets, including the day-ahead, intraday, and balancing markets, which will be established for this purpose. The long-awaited liberalization of the electricity market was undertaken in response to the EU’s requirement that Ukraine unbundle the transmission and distribution of electricity. Several steps and decisions still must be undertaken during the transition period, however. If those are not done in timely fashion, implementation of the new market model will miss the provisional July 2019 deadline.

Eurovision

In April Kyiv hosted the international Eurovision Song Contest 2017. Ukraine won the right to host it as a result of the first-place performance of the Ukrainian singer-songwriter Jamala in 2016. Kyiv hosted more than 60,000 tourists in association with this event.

However, preparations for the event were clouded by Ukraine-Russia tensions. The hosting country did not allow the Russian singer and contestant Yulia Samoilova to enter Ukraine (or participate in Eurovision 2017) because of her earlier visit to Crimea, in violation of official Ukrainian procedure (visitors desiring to visit Crimea must inform Ukrainian authorities of their interest and obtain permission).

The European Broadcasting Union, organizer of Eurovision, criticized both Ukraine and Russia. However, neither of the parties altered its decision. Ukraine did not permit Samoilova to enter Ukraine, and Russia did not select another contestant.

Ukraine-Canada Free Trade Agreement

In April, President Poroshenko signed the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement (which had been approved by the Verkhovna Rada on March 15). Negotiations on a free trade agreement between Ukraine and Canada had started in 2009 but were suspended later by Canada. After the Euromaidan, those negotiations were resumed by both parties, which led to the successful conclusion of the free trade agreement.

4.The Situation in the Donbas

Life after the Donbas Blockade

After the official decision on suspending cargo transport with the noncontrolled territories of the Donbas entered into force on the Ukrainian government-controlled side, separatist militants blocked deliveries of coal from that part of the Donbas in response. This created a situation in which Ukrainian electric power stations faced a lack of anthracite coal; metallurgical plants suffered as well. On February 15 the Ukrainian government announced a state of emergency in the energy sector, which it subsequently extended to the end of spring. By that time most of the power stations that used this type of coal had stopped operating in order to limit their anthracite consumption and avoid blackouts. Ukraine managed to get through the period without energy shortages by using other sources of energy.

Simultaneously, separatist militants started selling their coal to Russia. Such trade is illegal. Furthermore, the separatist regimes had earlier announced the expropriation of assets owned by Ukrainian businessmen. Also, the militants tried to sell coal to Turkey and Spain at reduced prices. Later, it emerged that some coal had been shipped to Poland. To prevent such smuggling of coal from the Donbas and the inadvertent purchase of own coal from Russia, the Ukrainian government opted to refuse all coal deliveries from Russia. Instead, Ukrainian companies started buying coal from South Africa and the United States. In such complicated circumstances, the Ukrainian energy sector proved strong and resilient. Russia actually admitted supporting enterprises located in the noncontrolled areas of the Donbas when the blockade began. This acknowledgment can be understood as a demonstration of Russia’s interest in the Donbas and a reason for the continued conflict in the region.

The disruption of economic ties with the noncontrolled part the Donbas and the expropriation of eastern Donbas enterprises by militants had a negative impact on the Ukrainian economy: the country’s GDP decreased, while its dependency on imports increased. According to an assessment of the National Bank of Ukraine, the blockade cost $1.8 billion in 2017 and is expected to cost $0.5 billion more in 2018.

U.S. OSCE Mission Officer Killed in Explosion

On April 23, an OSCE vehicle being used by the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine exploded in Luhansk oblast more than a mile from the line of fire. One member of the mission, the paramedic Joseph Stone, a U.S. citizen, died in the explosion, and two more SMM members were injured. An investigation showed the patrol vehicle had driven over a mine. This incident provoked strong criticism of the situation by German chancellor Angela Merkel and a U.S. State Department spokesperson. The Ukrainian government approached the incident as an act of terrorism.

With near daily reports of sexual harassment rippling through the U.S. media, entertainment industry, and political arena—reports that have toppled the careers of many prominent male figureheads—some may question whether the West represents a hopeful or optimistic model for women in other parts of the world. America’s failure to level the playing field for women, let alone eliminate systemic sexism, sets a bad precedent for women activists who are striving to thwart conservative or traditional forces in their own societies. That, at least, is the impression I got during a recent visit to Ukraine, where I had the opportunity to speak to women politicians, experts, and members of civil society.

I had been invited to Kyiv to participate in the Yalta European Strategy meeting, or YES, a gathering of policymakers, businesspeople, journalists, and others that is funded by a wealthy businessman, Viktor Pinchuk. Since 2004 the conference has sought to promote a political bridge between Ukraine and the West and EU. But if the YES conference sought to promote supposed Western-style values, including gender equality, I must have missed the note. Indeed, though I heard a few women speak at the conference, such as performance artist Marina Abramović and member of parliament Svitlana Zalishchuk, YES panels were overwhelmingly dominated by influential Western and Ukrainian men from the financial, business, and political spheres.

The Situation in Parliament

In an effort to gain a more personal perspective on the issue of gender equality in Ukraine, I caught up with Zalishchuk on the margins of the YES conference. A former participant in the country’s Euromaidan revolution of 2013–2014, Zalishchuk also worked as the executive director of the NGO Center UA, a Kyiv-based outfit that seeks to promote human rights and fight against corruption. More recently, Zalishchuk has been concerned with LGBT issues and gender equality as an MP.

When asked to comment on women’s progress since the Maidan, she remarked, “I think the situation is very dynamic.” The legislator adds that “the discourse on gender equality” has been gaining traction and visibility in the local and national media. The MP is moreover encouraged by recent developments in parliament, where women’s representation has hit an all-time high since Ukraine achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Zalishchuk herself has helped spearhead important initiatives, including an amendment to Ukraine’s electoral legislation stating that at least 30 percent of political parties’ slated candidates competing in local elections should be women.

Despite such progress, Zalishchuk didn’t sugarcoat the obstacles facing women. Within the upper ranks of big business, she said, there are fewer women CEOs than men. Meanwhile, though women have increased their numerical presence in parliament, they still only represent a “ridiculous” 12 percent of MP’s. Professor Tamara Martsenyuk, a sociologist at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, is appalled at the glacial pace of social progress in her country. “Since independence,” she told me, “Ukraine has shown little improvement as far as the overall number of women in parliament.” Furthermore, she said, people assume that politics is a “dirty business,” and this in turn bolsters patriarchal notions that tend to shut women out.

Zalishchuk confided that she personally had experienced sexism in parliament when a male colleague insulted her in the “worst possible manner.” Though it was certainly offensive, Zalishchuk said the episode proved to have a silver lining since other women in parliament closed ranks with her in a show of support. Together, they confronted the leader of her harasser’s parliamentary faction and threatened to block the floor unless they received an official apology. In the end, the party boss was forced to do just that, which Kalishchuk considered to be “a small victory for women’s solidarity.”

“Dominant Male Paradigm Ruling the World”

It’s one thing to diagnose societal injustice and quite another to come up with a viable plan to reverse such inequities. For Zalishchuk, simply leveling the economic playing field would go a long way toward remedying women’s disadvantaged position. Indeed, the MP added, Ukrainian women are so burdened with simple day-to-day survival and making ends meet that they have little time for their careers. In the long run, guaranteeing pay equity would certainly help the situation, though Zalishchuk frankly admitted that sexism and “the dominant male paradigm of ruling the world” run deep.

On the positive side, Martsenyuk noted, the issue of gender equality is now on the public radar and has acquired renewed visibility as a result of media attention and NGO pressure. Still, the academic believes that Ukraine displays deeply embedded sexist notions about gender roles. “Ukrainian women are supposed to fulfill two main roles,” she remarked, “to be beautiful so as to inspire men, and to be mothers. This narrow view doesn’t leave much room for women to fulfill other roles.”

After the YES conference was over, I sought out other female perspectives. Just up the hill from Maidan Square I met Olena Shevchenko, director of the local NGO Insight which works to protect the human rights of women as well as the LGBT community. By Ukrainian standards, Shevchenko is somewhat unusual. While she was growing up and in school, she became a professional wrestler, in which activity she encountered discrimination and resistance from male athletes. The experience led Shevchenko to become a feminist fighting for full-fledged equality as opposed to reinforcing societal norms and stereotypes about what constitutes typical male or female identity.

Shevchenko’s organization embraces an outwardly feminist approach in its work while seeking to promote the inclusion of transsexual and intersex people. The activist believes that Ukraine’s gender inequality problem is so entrenched that it will take a full-scale societal overhaul for things to change. Fundamentally, she said, women in politics share a traditionalist outlook and believe they will lose votes if they support LGBT rights.

From the Soviet Era to the Present

On the surface, at least, it might seem ironic that feminists would be considered such outliers in Ukraine: in 1917 the Soviet state introduced female suffrage, and three years later abortion was legalized. What is more, during the 1930s Ukrainian women developed their own mass-based organizations, child care centers, and cooperatives. Martsenyuk, however, believes the Soviet approach to gender politics was decidedly “ambivalent.” To be sure, she said, the Soviets sought to “free women from kitchen slavery” as the state regarded women as a “reserve labor force.” In practice, however, women still found themselves overburdened by regular household chores.

Beneath it all, Ukraine has proved to be patriarchal and resistant to change, suggesting the Soviet era might have been more of an aberration than anything else. In the post-Soviet era, Ukraine has been casting about for a new identity, and Berehynia, a kind of folkloric “hearth mother,” has gained a lot of symbolic traction. Indeed, one need look no further than downtown Kyiv for evidence of Ukraine’s Berehynia revival, in the form of a giant mural titled “Protectress” gracing the side of a building. In turning to Berehynia as a cult symbol, Ukrainians seem to be harking back to an ancient, matrilineal past that reinforces traditional views of women.

Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church has leapt into the ideological breach by reinforcing traditional gender roles, in contrast, perhaps, to the somewhat flawed and cosmetic Soviet reforms. “I don’t think Ukraine is so different from Russia,” Shevchenko declared. The LGBT activist added that “people have lost faith in government and the police, so naturally they turn to the church.” Shevchenko said the church was particularly influential during the Euromaidan and led daily prayers on the square. In many schools, she explained, particularly in western Ukraine, children are obliged to take instruction in Christian ethics.

Controversy over Domestic Abuse

Shevchenko was particularly concerned about the politically influential All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, an interconfessional group that represents several faiths, including Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic. “The Council signed an agreement stating that it is against any forms of ‘LGBT propaganda,’ whatever that means, as well as gender education,” the activist remarked. The rising power of the council has profound implications for women, for example when it comes to the alarming increase in the rate of domestic abuse.

Recently, the body lobbied the government to block the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention. The Council of Churches says it wants to stamp out domestic violence, though religious figures objected to certain wording in the statute that they claimed would blur traditional concepts of gender. According to the wording of the Istanbul Convention, victims are protected from abuse based on their “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” as opposed to strictly defined male and female categories. Such an approach, the Council of Churches feared, could serve as a stealthy backdoor mechanism that could wind up legitimizing same-sex relations in schools and universities.

Religious Lobbying

Religious lobbying on the Istanbul Convention has led to a backlash, with human rights groups and Amnesty International blasting the Council of Churches. Marharyta Tarasova, an activist with the Kyiv-based Human Rights Information Center, has remarked, “If the Council of Churches believes the word ‘gender’ threatens the institution of family then it should take issue with husbands who have beaten and raped women. By doing this, they will see that in fact, the institution of family is most threatened by domestic violence.”

On the positive side, Martsenyuk is encouraged that Ukraine was the first former Soviet state to introduce domestic violence legislation, more than ten years ago. The sociologist noted that Ukraine had taken a further encouraging step by adopting separate legislation dealing with the prevention of human trafficking, yet another critical gender-based problem. On the other hand, she told me, gender-based violence is still a huge problem in Ukrainian society, and there isn’t sufficient political will to tackle the issue.

Though Ukraine signed the Istanbul Convention back in 2011, religious leaders torpedoed the initiative late last year when they pressured MPs to vote against ratification of the agreement. Needless to say, MPs allowed representatives of the Council of Churches to attend a parliamentary hearing on the matter, and later conservative politicians remarked that the language of the Istanbul Convention stood to utterly ruin “Ukrainian identity.”

The Ukrainian Church, Martsenyuk says, has sought to rally fellow conservative forces by engaging in homophobic tactics. “This should be roundly criticized,” Martsenyuk declared, because Ukraine is considered to be a secular state in which the church is not supposed to play an important political role. Such underlying culture wars may jeopardize Ukraine’s standing in the West, and recently the Council of Europe’s Commissioner wrote the Ukrainian parliamentary chair, urging Kyiv to hurry up and ratify the convention.

War, Feminism, and Ukraine’s “G.I. Jane”

Having concluded our discussion about the church, I asked Shevchenko how recent turbulent events, including the Euromaidan revolution and the war with Russian-backed separatists in the East, had affected feminist politics in Ukraine. Sighing, the activist remarked, “We had a huge problem with sexism on the Euromaidan which stressed such notions as ‘the real male hero’ doing battle on the barricades.” At the same time, the media urged women to come to the Maidan to support male heroes. In the aftermath of the Euromaidan, right-wing military battalions played a prominent role in the war against Russian-backed separatists, and Shevchenko commented that “this ultra-right nationalist discourse is completely against the LGBT community and gender equality.”

Paradoxically, perhaps, some women fought in right-wing battalions, such as the Right Sektor, which has denounced the LGBT community. The most celebrated woman to have served in the war, Nadiya Savchenko, fought in the right-wing Aidar battalion. Prior to enlisting with Aidar, Savchenko served as an army aviation pilot. One of the most notorious and visible units fighting in eastern Ukraine, Aidar has been criticized for violating the human rights of civilians and enemy combatants alike within the conflict zone. Savchenko, who was captured by Russian forces and imprisoned for nearly two years before being returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange program, has been hailed as a hero and a symbol of women’s progress. When asked about Aidar, Savchenko is unapologetic: “You sit on the couch and ask us how we fought. We fought the way we had to. Or you think that saints are fighting there?” she said.

What Happened to Progressive Feminism?

What are the chances that Ukraine will produce a progressive, feminist figurehead who might serve as a counterpoint to the likes of Savchenko? Recent developments involving the activist group FEMEN suggest such notions could still be far off. Founded in 2008, FEMEN quickly became a vocal opponent of far-right politics throughout Europe and achieved notoriety for its topless protests. The original founders of the group were concerned about abusive fathers or boyfriends and mothers who had to support families while men turned to alcohol, not to mention prostitution and sex trafficking, which have ravaged postcommunist Ukraine. Activists dressed in pink and held marches, yet they were ignored. Changing tactics, they decided to take their clothes off to garner more attention. In one high-profile action, FEMEN made headlines when women barricaded themselves inside Kyiv’s Saint Sophia cathedral in a topless protest against a church-supported bill that would have banned abortion.

Needless to say, such actions reportedly placed the group at odds with many in wider society. In 2013, police claimed to have discovered weapons in the group’s offices. FEMEN said the weapons had been planted, and the founders were obliged to flee Ukraine in fear of their lives. During the Euromaidan, FEMEN did not have a visible presence, and, if anything, some in the crowd proved hostile to a feminist message. Indeed, feminists were reportedly attacked not only by far-right groups but also by older people who were simply passing by, including men and women over the age of fifty.

It’s unclear whether groups like FEMEN, whose organizational headquarters are now located in Paris, can attract much of a domestic following. Martsenyuk remarked that FEMEN made a strategic mistake by focusing on too many disparate issues, which diluted the group’s message. FEMEN’s departure “is entirely understandable,” Shevchenko told me. “Here in Ukraine,” she added, “radical feminism is simply not understood, and it’s regarded as a ‘perversion.’ I understand why FEMEN left, since the reality is that it’s simply not safe enough for a group like this to operate.”

Selective Understanding of “European Values”

To be sure, one may debate FEMEN’s political tactics, but isn’t it a little ironic that such groups have been given such a frosty reception in Ukraine, a nation that is determined to join the ranks of the ostensibly more liberal West? “Absolutely,” Shevchenko answered, adding that Ukrainians have a “selective” understanding of what the West is all about. “We want the euro, high salaries, good education, access to health care and anticorruption measures, but we don’t want the West to impose its ‘perversions.’”

Four years after the Euromaidan, Shevchenko believes that Ukraine still sees the West through rose-tinted glasses, even though “most regular people have never traveled to other countries, and there’s still a basic lack of understanding about what constitutes human rights.” Ironically, even though Ukraine seeks to distinguish itself from Russia, the two countries share similar views when it comes to cultural norms. Like Moscow, which demonizes the West for its “European values” while championing its own traditional values, the Ukrainian media also employ such comparisons. In this vein, Shevchenko said, “Any form of emancipation or feminism or gender equality is seen as ‘European values.’”

In light of its current political disarray, populism, and intolerance, not to mention festering and ongoing problems with sexism in some areas, does the West offer a hopeful model for Ukraine? “Personally, I don’t think so,” Shevchenko said. Nevertheless, the activist added, the West could still play an important role. “My message would be: don’t mess up on human rights since the West must provide a positive example for the rest of the world.” If Western countries promote pluralism, gender equality, and LGBT rights, this could have a ripple effect by demonstrating to Ukraine’s ultra-right that liberal values are more enduring than intolerance.